Re: Programming vs. Technical Writing

[Matt Ion <soundy -at- SOUNDY -dot- ML -dot- ORG>]

I haven't been following this thread, but I thought I'd catch what
Arlen had to say on the subject.  My apologies if this has been said
already...

On Thu, 13 Aug 1998 11:47:25 -0500, Walker, Arlen P wrote:

>As is always the case, it's simply a matter of correctly understanding the
>needs of the audience and filling them.

...but it seems to me that there's one critical difference between
these two: people can extrapolate information to a relatively large
degree when necessary.  They can work from context, read between the
lines, fill in the blanks when necessary.

Computers can't.  They have to be told EXACTLY what to do, and they
will do it EXACTLY as they're told, and if they run into something they
don't understand, they stop dead in their tracks until a human helps
them out.

>Back in my programming days, it was a matter fo pride to bum a few
>instruction cycles out of your code. Programmers today are sloppy by
>comparison, because of all the extra power they've got laying around. When
>I think of what used to fit in 64K of RAM, and what now requires nearly
>64Meg, I shake my head in wonder.

<OT rant>
I used to have a word processor on my old Commodore 64, called
Paperback Writer.  It was the first one that I'm aware of to have
complete *online*, quasi-context-sensitive help (hit F7 just about
anywhere to get help on what you were doing) *and* a complete
spellchecker.

This was no simple text editor, either.  While the 64's text-video mode
only supported 40 columns, Paperback used its 320x160 hi-res video mode
to generate 80-column, semi-WYSIWYG editing.  Underlined, boldface and
italicized text was displayed properly, and super- and sub-script were
indicated using different-colored lettering.  It had extensive (for the
time) cut-and-paste capabilities as well.

Later, a spreadsheet and database (Paperback Planner and Paperback
Filer) were added and the three were packaged together; they could
share the spellchecker and easily transport and export/import files
between the three: the first(?) integrated office suite.

The whole of Paperback Writer resided on two 170kb, 5.25" floppies: one
for the program and help files, one for the spellchecker and
dictionary.  As the name implies, the C-64 had a massive 64k of RAM
(most machines now have eight times that amount of L2 cache!) and a
hammer-down Motorola 6510 processor running at a smokin' 1MHz clock
speed.

Today, multiply the RAM and storage requirements by 1024, quadruple the
CPU bits and increase its speed by a factor of 400, and you get a
program with a lot of bells and whistles that nobody needs or uses (and
no, that doesn't include dancing paperclips... those don't even rate a
small whistle), while getting about the same overall performance for
the same basic functions that everyone has come to take for granted.

Ahhhh, progress.
</rant>


 Your friend and mine,
 Matt
 <All standard disclaimers apply>
 "Reality is in alpha test on protoype hardware."
 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

 Having is not so pleasing a thing as wanting;
 it is not logical, but it is often true.
                                - Spock


 From ??? -at- ??? Sun Jan 00 00:00:00 0000=