[REBOL] Re: Handy Hints Page
From: brett:codeconscious at: 13-Jan-2002 23:02
Hi,
> Sunanda wrote:
> > Of course they could be found by someone doing a determined and
exhaustive
> search. But how many postings containing "sort" would you have to read to
> find this tip? How is anyone starting Rebol next week ever going to
stumble
> across Volver's brilliant vv?
>
> > It's not a new suggestion (I know, cos I've made it twice before, though
> not on this list) that somewhere we have a "Handy hints" page that
preserves
> and showcases all the small simple "tricks" that give Rebol such depth.
I know what you mean Sunanda. My "solution" was to attempt record everything
that suprised me on the list or that was non-obvious. This was a commitment
I made while I was heavily learning Rebol. This was (a) going to be useful
to me, and I figured, (b) useful to others. This was the inital content for
codeconscious.com.
Some issues:
I make an effort to read 95% of mails on the list. This by itself is time
consuming let alone adding editing and publishing (even with a simple Rebol
content system).
Some things are not far enough different from other information in the notes
or the official documentation to warrant seperate topics. Checking the
resources first takes time.
Some things like Volker's insight regarding vv require a context to be
established before their value is appreciated.
Put too much information out and it just becomes noise or is too fragmented
(this is my problem with wikis).
A distributed approach to collecting this information seems sensible. My
suggestion. Do what I did, record the stuff you say "Aha!" to. Use the web
model - knit the results together. Obviously redundancies will occur but
they will not be exactly alike - and the differences can be useful by
themselves. I believe there is value in people "explaining in their own
words" what they understand or what is meaningful to them - so I think a
centralised glossary or FAQ would unfortunately discard some useful implied
context. That said a common encoding format (most like related to make-doc
format) would be useful for
searching.
Lastly here's a shameless plug for an "old" store of info:
http://www.codeconscious.com/rebol/
Brett.
