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Why not translate this whole project into Aramaic? [message #49711]

Thu, 12 April 2018 20:29

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

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