I am arguing against RTFM as a stock response.
There are times when it is definitely appropriate, but I don't think
this is one of them.
Heiko Niemann started this thread by asking for advice on how to use a
particular construct, and various people offered advice that addressed his
question.
You, Ihe, then raised a question about who was to blame if programmers got it
wrong, the programmers or the spec writers?
We have an honourable and valuable tradition in the programming profession that
we try to solve problems without apportioning blame.
If there are usability problems, it can certainly be instructive to study how
they arose, and how the user's expectations of the system came to be different
from its actual behaviour. But you don't seem to be engaging in a constructive
discussion of that question. Discussing "who is to blame" is almost never
useful, because usually, no-one is to blame; the cause of usability problems is
generally that the designer didn't understand the mindset of the user, and vice
versa, and neither can be blamed for that in a world where the the user was not
available to be consulted at the time the design was done.
As it happens, no one responded by saying "read the F manual". On the contrary,
several people contributed information derived from the F manual, to spare
Heiko the trouble of reading it.
If you think that response is inappropriate, it's probably because your agenda
is different from Heiko's. Heiko wanted advice on how best to use the language;
you seem to want to analyse why people make mistakes, which is nothing to do
with the original thread.
Michael Kay
Saxonica
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