[mercury-users] More supporting material

[Luke Evans]

Yeah, I agree.  Like you say there's no substitute for just getting stuck
in.  To do this, I find I like to have three kinds of resource:

1) Examples.  Small, maybe incomplete 'fragments' with lots of ellipses
where other code goes, but nonetheless lots of _patterns_ which I can refer
to in the early part of the learning curve.  As well as providing actual and
specific examples of particular features of the language/library, these
patterns tend to reinforce each other, so the nature of the language and the
generality of how things are done, gradually sinks in by 'osmosis' :-)
The code samples are a good way to augment example usage, but I like
examples with minimal context too as this strips away as much 'noise' as
possible.

2) Tutorial text.  This is the most prosaic form of the required resources.
It's the most directed of course, so you have to go with the flow if you're
attempting to learn from scratch, but if it punctuated with enough worked
examples, then it will continue to have a referential use even in quite late
stages of learning.

3) Reference texts.  I like to see a language reference, obviously, but then
a quality reference for the standard libraries too.  This may even be a good
place for some of the examples in (1).  Taking (arbitrarily) the graph
module in the standard library, when I've just sat down to write some code
and think that I need an ADT like a graph, I want to judge the 'fit' of
standard module and then get a quick idea of the model of its usage.  All I
have at present with the libraries are brief comments in the interface
declaration, and maybe if I hunt through the samples (or even compiler code)
I'll find my example.  

Anyhow, however you slice it up, 'more is better'.  The quality issues and
auditing/moderating the content so it's most approachable are secondary
issues really.  I'm sure we'd all like to have the problem where there's
'too much' material from which to choose an official subset of examples!

Although I admit we're talking about a totally different world here (like
multi-million dollar backers), one of the things that most impressed me
about Java was the richness of the official suite of supporting
documentation and samples.  The online Java tutorial still (IMHO) compares
favourably with books (mind you, I think it IS a book now).  So, not only
was the design of the language/libraries good, but it was easy to start to
appreciate this by absorbing this online information.  This can only have
helped with its meteoric rise out of obscurity.

Luke



-----Original Message-----
From: Robert Ernst Johann JESCHOFNIK [mailto:rejj at students.cs.mu.oz.au]
Sent: 09 June 1999 03:35
To: mercury-users at cs.mu.OZ.AU
Subject: Re: [mercury-users] More supporting material




On Mon, 7 Jun 1999, Luke Evans wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> This could quite easily seems like a negative criticism - it isn't.  I
know
> this has been discussed before, but I continue to feel that Mercury is
under
> represented in terms of supporting material - tutorials, documentation,
> examples etc.

Along these lines, something that I would like to see would be a set
(doesn't have to be very big) of practice exercises of ranging difficulty.
I found Ralph's tutorial most helpfull, but as with most things you don't
really learn until you get in and do it yourself.

Concerning the previous thread, I think the contribution of supporting
material from the users is a very good idea - the people using Mercury can
share their knowledge, and it also lets the developers spend the time
*developing* :)
I'd be glad to contribute anything... once I know what I am doing. :)

aah well. Back to exam study. heh.

Rob

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
mercury-users mailing list
post:  mercury-users at cs.mu.oz.au
administrative address: owner-mercury-users at cs.mu.oz.au
unsubscribe: Address: mercury-users-request at cs.mu.oz.au Message: unsubscribe
subscribe:   Address: mercury-users-request at cs.mu.oz.au Message: subscribe
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
mercury-users mailing list
post:  mercury-users at cs.mu.oz.au
administrative address: owner-mercury-users at cs.mu.oz.au
unsubscribe: Address: mercury-users-request at cs.mu.oz.au Message: unsubscribe
subscribe:   Address: mercury-users-request at cs.mu.oz.au Message: subscribe
--------------------------------------------------------------------------