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Home » Community » Coffee corner » Why not translate this whole project into Aramaic? (This looks like a good project. If only it were comprehensible!)
Why not translate this whole project into Aramaic? [message #49711] Thu, 12 April 2018 20:29 Go to next message
orionyx is currently offline  orionyx
Messages: 1
Registered: April 2018
Junior Member
I came across Ultimate++ a while ago, and recently decided to use it on Ubuntu 16.4. Oy vey!
First I had to find it. Has anyone here ever tried to google Ultimate++? You get thousands of hits for anyone who has ever used Ultimate to describe his product. And that's everyone! But eventually after finding an old backup of my bookmarks, i got to the site. Downloaded, installed.
I thought I could figure it out by myself. It's not as though I don't have experience using documentation written by Trobriand Islanders who have never encountered what they are writing about. I have managed to work out how to use Visual Studio using only Microsoft's documentation. I am sure I would have been able to crack Enigma in my spare time, using only an abacus. But your documentation is the Ultimate in opacity. I measure the readability by the number of links you have to follow to understand a single entry - the more the links, the less readable - and yours is off the scale. If I had 4 hands, I would not have enough fingers to mark all the pages.
It doesn't help that the authors of the documentation have two problems to contend with. First, they are not native English speakers. This is why I suggest translation into Aramaic. Since few people speak it, you will have to work hard at translating it, and readers will expect to work hard to understand it. Of course, writing it in readable English in the first place would be simpler.... but this is where your second problem shows. You think like the makers of the software, and assume that everyone else has your knowledge and insight into it. This is simply wrong.
Now, all this is not a deal-breaker. I came back to your site and found that today, after some years, you have done some work on it and released a new version. Till that moment I had been thinking of U++ as being moribund. Now that I know it's not, I will persevere.
And nobody should criticize without offering advice. My advice to you is: first, change the name to something easy to find! Wh6y not just put an X at the beginning of the name - Xultimate. Drop the final e - Xultimat. There - easy and unique to google.
As for the documentation, i will have to make notes for myself to understand all of this, so i'll let you have those. you can get someone else to pretty them up, but since you are giving me the software free, you can have the notes free too.
regards
STAN
Re: Why not translate this whole project into Aramaic? [message #49715 is a reply to message #49711] Fri, 13 April 2018 08:40 Go to previous message
koldo is currently offline  koldo
Messages: 3355
Registered: August 2008
Senior Veteran
Laughing Laughing Laughing

Thank you Orionyx for your advice.

I've often wondered why a fantastic post doesn't get feedback, the girl who should love me doesn't love me*, or there are programmers who still use Python even if you show them that with C++ their programs would be just as long, the IDE would be easier to install, and their applications would be 20 times faster...

The world is complex, we are not good at web design, SEO and marketing in general. We are people from all over the world and for many English is not our mother tongue.

However, we try to develop such a productive tool so that with few people we in our companies can make powerful programs. We have tried to give as much help as possible, sometimes even levels that nobody gives (see tutoring_plan) to the new programmers who, perhaps by accident, come to us.

We are not perfect, just programmers. If you can give us advice, help with programming, web design, correct English, public relations, etc, you are very welcome. And if you'll just invite us to a few beers**... you're also welcome to join us.

* I'm happily married.
** You have to know that several major developers live in countries with a lot of experience in beer.


Best regards
IƱaki
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