Re: Holy Doodle Batman

["vic plichota" <atsvap@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jeff F.:
>If you need more documentation to get started you might want older
>things that have had more time to be documented.

The point was that the documentation should come *first* --
professional design requires a product specification, and the spec
req's that the product's features, behavior, and physical +
functional characteristics be fully defined -- *beforehand*.

This is never a perfect process, and certainly iterative revisions
occur, but at least it provides a clear target, and permits several
people to work in parallel, both during the product-definition
brainstorming, and the dog-work of implementation -- for instance
test software can be written, and an evaluation PCB designed, even
before the silicon layout is finished...


>If you want to be out in front then hopefully
>you will write some documentation for those
>who may also want to move to more modern designs.

Good idea!  But this requires being invited onto the team during the
earliest conceptual phase, and a continous, fully-informed
involvement during the development process -- no-one enjoys writing
doc'n that is simply wrong, and has to be scrapped.  Worse yet,
customer faith is shattered if the product fails to live up to it's
published design info.


>I know one of the designers claims that
>in order to make ShBoom II more attractive to Java and "C"
programmers
>that some of the operations that are important to Forth were
degraded.
>In a  way it is a little like what was done to Forth in ANS Forth.

Maybe so, but I can't see it;  it seems a very well thought-out
compromise to me.


cheers   - vic