[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: "Clean Specs"
> The spec is not an introduction. How many people here learnt C++ > by reading the ANSI spec? How many people here learned to tune a > radio by reading the international specifications for radio > frequency allocation? I keep reading these challenges, first aboout Java, and now about C++. Well, just as I first learned Java from Sun's specs, I also happened to have mostly learned C++ from Stroustroup's Annotated Reference Manual, which is as close as C++ had to a spec for quite a while. Now true enough, as Paul Prescod points out, it is quite another matter to learn a completely foreign language from a spec: I was already very familiar with C, Smalltalk and somewhat familiar with Objective-C before tackling C++, and I was very conversant with C++ before tackling Java, but I don't think it's at all freakish to learn a language or system from a well-written spec. I happen to like formalisms, and although it probably takes me much longer to learn a new system as the seven days of the "dummies" books, I am happier in my masochism. Here's an example: I've just spent a good part of today and yesterday wading through the spec for the CORBA object transaction service for implementation in a project (we're using an ORB that doesn't support OTS). My brain might be about to explode, but I think I can get some useful work done now. I'm sure I could have found an intro from Orfali and Harkey somewhere with cute cartoons of aliens explaining the protocol for a two-phase commit, but I'm usually doubtful about what I really know after such tutorials. So in short: there is nothing wrong about trying to learn from a well-written spec. My problem with some W3C specs is not complexity (in fact, they are probably the most straightforward specs I've read). It's more typically, as I've said before, inconsistency, incompleteness, and unclearness (in the sense of "ambiguity" rather than "abstruseness"). -- Uche Ogbuji FourThought LLC, IT Consultants uche.ogbuji@f... (970)481-0805 Software engineering, project management, Intranets and Extranets http://FourThought.com http://OpenTechnology.org xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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