Quote #601
Most Documentation Starts As Hastily Scrawled Notes From Sleep-deprived
Developers Who Weren't Necessarily Hired For Their Keen Communication
Skills.
Most documentation starts as hastily scrawled notes from sleep-deprived
developers who weren't necessarily hired for their keen communication
skills. Those notes are then fleshed out by recently graduated English
majors who have spent their last four years immersed in works of fiction.
The results are then passed on to the marketing department whose job it is
to make sure that no word or phrase will reflect unfavorably on the product
("I don't think that the word 'Basic' properly communicates the exciting
nature of the product. Why don't we call it 'Visual Zesty?!'"). It is then
beset by lawyers who finish the job by making sure that they haven't
explicitly promised that the product will actually do anything. By the time
the documentation gets into your hands, it has been so sanitized for your
protection and generalized beyond recognition that you usually have to go
out and buy a 3rd-party manual (that was, more likely than not, written by
the same non-technical technical writer who wrote the original
documentation) in a vain attempt to get an unbiased, unexpurgated, and
unfiltered view of just how you're really supposed to use the stuff.
-- Introduction, About The "@ Novell" Series, November 3, 1998
