Re: Why are drives called "wd0", "wd1", etc?

[Daniel Carrera <dcarrera%gmail.com@localhost>]

On 08/04/2011 08:02 PM, Scrap Happy wrote:
> Why did it take so long for a (g)tar(1) man page to come into existence?
> <grin>
>
> People (on average) just don't like to prepare good documentation.
> "It's boring" seems to be the general attitude. But, in fact, it
> is actually very *difficult* to do! Unlike code where you can
> "see if it works" (as one measure of your success), documentation
> is much more subjective and prone to lots of assumptions on the
> part of the writer ("Oh, I thought everyone *knew* that so I
> didn't bother to explain it...")

As someone who has written a fair amount of documentation, I can testify 
to that - it *is* difficult. A lot of work, not much glory.


> And, most documentation tends to be written after-the-fact...
> describing (often incompletely) how something (appears to) work
> instead of how it is intended to work. (there is a subtle
> difference, here, but one that, IMO, dramatically affects the
> style of the documentation)

Or worse, written by someone who did not write the software, as in my 
case. I've written documentation for OpenOffice.org and for the Perl 
Data Language, and I was not a developer for either. In both cases, I 
was just a user who got fed up at the lack of documentation and decided 
to write some.

Daniel.
--
I'm not overweight, I'm undertall.