[Gambas-user] Gambas-Documentation

[Benoît Minisini]

Le 06/06/2017 à 12:53, Hans Lehmann a écrit :
> A warm Hello to all friends of the Gambas programming language,
> 
> many years ago users complained in various Gambas forum posts about the
> lack of books about Gambas in the German language. I liked Gambas from
> the beginning. Its conception allows people, like myself, switching over
> from other environments as well as ambitioned programmers to work on a
> range of different tasks in a single language. This motivated me as early
> as 2008 to design a concept for a Gambas book. For a few years now this
> book is made available online at www.gambas-buch.de. Many chapters have
> already been published. With great effort, the team of authors pursues
> the goal to produce a good description of the components and classes of
> Gambas and to demonstrate their use in example projects. Every chapter
> and its parts are also offered as a PDF file, and archives of the tested
> demonstration projects are available for download.
> 
> However, our work on the online book is hampered increasingly because some
> components and their classes have only fragmentary documentation in the
> Gambas wiki, or none at all. By tolerating this condition, the Gambas
> developers throw away opportunities for newcomers to discover and use
> Gambas. A class or component should, in my opinion, only be released after
> its documentation is complete and correct and put on the Gambas wiki.
> Do the developers really believe that a potential Gambas user will read
> all the source code to understand how the properties, methods and events
> work? (I, for one, have never learned C.) To me, for example, it is clear
> after over 44 years as a grammar school teacher -- among others for
> Computer Science -- that nothing motivates more than success und success
> has to be prepared.
> 
> This brings us to the crucial point with Gambas: all efforts should 
> currently
> be directed towards quickly closing the gaps and flaws in the 
> documentation!
> One only learns a language well by speaking it -- and this is only possible
> with a good dictionary! Such an excellent programming language as Gambas
> should enjoy a thorough documentation of the existing components and 
> classes
> with small projects or code snippets which show the essential properties
> and methods in action. If you have a look at the current state of the
> documentation, you will see that it is exceedingly incomplete. Do the
> developers seriously think that the Gambas programmers can read in a 
> crystal
> ball if all that's known about a class is the names of its properties,
> methods and events?
> 
> The software farm with its projects does not replace a systematic treatment
> of the basics of the language. The online book wanted to provide just that
> for the German-speaking Gambas programmers, and those who want to be! If
> none or only insufficient information about the properties, methods and
> events of a Gambas class is available, then a newbie or a Gambas 
> programmer,
> who wants to use this class, will resign and turn to other languages.
> 
> My wish is essentially just that the developers do their job until the end
> and provide the documentation for their classes, because only then can 
> their
> valuable work be truly useful. Only then can Gambas finally make progress.
> 
> Honsek
> www.gambas-buch.de
> 

You are right, it's just that time is missing on my side, because of 
many other activities.

I plan to release Gambas 3.10 soon, and document the gb.web.form 
component that allows to make web applications a bit like GUI applications.

And of course filling the other missing entries in the documentation on 
the components I made.

Regards,

-- 
Benoît Minisini