Subject: Re: CLOS is hard. Let's go shopping (Was Re: Lisp in Python) From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 17 Oct 2002 18:46:29 +0000 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3243869189008575@naggum.no> * Alan S. Crowe : | shows that `main' has been affliced by `nuisance'. Excellent example. | My main qualification for writing tutorials is that I am learning Lisp | myself. Thus I an intimately acquainted with the confusions that assail | and distress newbies. The problem with this is that you meet these things in a totally random order. The point of a tutorial is to make order of the chaos. I am fairly strongly convinced that the best way to make that order is to be very knowledgeable and very observant when you try to teach a lot of people the same material and have time to follow up on them to see how they do and to correct your own mistakes. Hence I am extremely doubtful of teaching material that has been written by other than teachers and much prefer to fight my way through reference works when I have enough glimpses of the order to at least not get lost in the chaos. However, as a shining example of an excellent instruction on CLOS that helped me sort out the order of the dense specification, Sonya Keene's book only gets higher commendations from me as time goes on while the misnamed «ANSI Common Lisp» by Paul Graham gets lower. | There is plenty of enthusiasm for spotting technical errors in short | postings put directly on comp.lang.lisp. However, if I write some | lengthy tutorials, etiquette will require that I put them on my website | and post the URL to the list. Are there enough folk willing to follow a | link, read a long tutorial and then point out the technical errors? People who did you this kind of service deserve to be co-authors at the very least. But when you do this, you implicitly argue that none of the existing material is good enough and ask people who may think it is better than yours to help make yours better than everything else. This may be a tall order. I doubt that you want to make this argument explicitly, however, so I instead wonder what tutorials and other works on CLOS you have read before you decided to write your own tutorial. -- Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder. Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.