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[Axiom-developer] A student comment


From: daly
Subject: [Axiom-developer] A student comment
Date: Tue, 4 Sep 2007 19:33:02 -0500

Ondrej,

Well, "send a patch or shut up" is pretty much a statement that if
you plan to contribute you need to do SOME form of work, if only to
get educated about the project you plan to criticise. Criticism is
a valuable "patch" if it is well informed.

Axiom has a goal of a new, non-archaic user interface called Crystal.
I've spent a fair amount of time researching the subject and creating
little test case setups to experiment with ideas. The Crystal effort
has been discussed on this list. Had the student taken the time to 
read the list they might have generated a question, a proposal, or
an informed comment about the long term vision of a new user interface.

Calling the help system (documented in the axiom book, previously 
defined, recently fixed and extended to 160 algebra files) "archaic" is 
easily viewed as (a) uninformed criticism, (b) ignoring the value of being
able to actually get help immediately, and (c) failing to scratch one's 
own itch.

Had the student bothered to generate more than a knee-jerk comment
we could have had a reasonable design discussion about some subgoal
of a radically new help system (e.g. crystal), a previously well
research help system (e.g. DWIM), or a porting discussion for
hyperdoc to some other platform (e.g. Firefox).

Frankly though, "its archaic" is a worthless, effortless, bit of noise.

Tim








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