[Edu-sig] Oh, the TEACHERS! --> The Educator must be Educated vs. Anthropormorphic Erroring vs. Finding OUT things you know Already

[Jason Cunliffe]

Hello

Wow full moon this month really got Edu-Sig whipped up... And I am 
feeling somehwere between fascinated and horrified at this discussion, 
but can't resist adding 0.2 myself, Thanks maybe to two items I read 
this morning:

Unsentimental Education 
www.thenation.com/doc/20060925/hitchens 
<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060925/hitchens>

<quote>
It is only toward the very end of the memoir that Hughes utters the line 
that furnishes the title. "By now," he says, "I realized that my main 
impulse for writing a book was to force myself to find out about things 
I didn't know." This could be said by or about almost any author--"the 
educator must be educated," as Marx put it, and no serious person is not 
self-taught--but it would be as true to say of Hughes that he came to 
find out things that he knew already.
</quote>

.......................................
Anthropomorphic REBOL
http://www.rebol.net/cgi-bin/blog.r?view=0294#comments

<quote>
At times in discussions, documentation, or error messages, REBOL may be 
treated as a living entity. It's not done that often, but some users 
find it annoying. I remember that it was annoying in the Logo 
programming language. If you typed "foo", the system would respond:

I don't know how to foo

REBOL does not go that far.

On the other hand, some users find a degree of anthropomorphism to be 
useful. It gives them another "mind tool" to help them program REBOL.

For example, in R2.0:

>> insert 1
** Script Error: insert expected series argument of type: series port bitset

This wording was intentional. I selected that message because it put the 
most important element, the function name, first. However, that does 
make it sound a bit anthropomorphic. Just a bit.

As an experiment, in R3.0, I changed the error to:

>> insert 1
** Script Error: integer not allowed as the series argument of insert

Is that error more clear? Here the offending datatype gets first 
position, and the function gets the tail.
</Quote>

----------------
That was a post by REBOL's prime creator Carl Sassenrath on his blog as 
he works towards REBOL3, a better brighter major rewrite which threatens 
to maybe also break some legacy code. Sound familiar? Actionscript3 
under Adobe's  tree now, is doing that too, though REBOL is famously 
short and compact compared to the galactic scaled resources and 
libraries of Java, Python etc

Anyway, in reply there swiftly emerged consensus among experienced REBOL 
programmers that they like the current [old] error more friendly one better.
Among those comments was this gem:

<quote>
*Brian Wisti: *I share Henrik's opinion that the "not allowed" error 
message is not as clear as the "expected" message. Both tell me I'm 
using the wrong type, but the "expected" message gives me a full summary 
of what types I can use.

But really, so long as you never get anything like Python's "Syntax 
Error: Invalid Syntax", I will be pretty content.
</quote>

---------------

I read recently that  Lao-Tse  thought XML was verbose but  that did not 
matter because computers  will someday learn from poets.
 
Jason