Subject: Re: "Well, I want to switch over to replace EMACS LISP with Guile." From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 30 Sep 2002 16:31:53 +0000 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3242392313780400@naggum.no> * Tim Bradshaw | Manual-inches, incidentally, is the best known unit. I tend to measure things by the weight and thickness of the paper and the spaciousness of the typography of the books you find on the market about something. I have seen books on Visual Basic with the same page count as books on C but with 3 times the shelf space. I have seen books on HTML with same amount of contents as books on Ada with 9 times the volume. I have come to believe that large print, thick and heavy paper, and wide margins and oversize leading is indicative of the expected intelligence of the reader. If the reader is expected to be unable to concentrate or experiences mental fatigue just by looking at a page of text without oceans of whitespace, the material is probably geared towards people whose reading skills plateaued before they entered high school. Compare children's books and books on Web Duhsign or other X-in-21-days books. If the reading level of a specification is below college level, chances are the people behind it are morons and the result morose. If typography and reading level are comparable, manual-inches is probably a good measure, but a children's specification for something may be thinner than a solid work of engineering that it would actually take less time to grasp because it is so hard to sink to the level of children who need to be told things over and over and usually do not remeber subtle differences from repetition to repetion like reasonably smart people do. (At least I find that I cannot read material written by people who are too stupid. This was, incidentally, how I first began to understand that sports in the newsmedia is /intended/ to keep people in a semi-comatose, non-thinking state of mind where cheering for some idiot gang of testosterone bombs could be regarded as recreationally rewarding.) -- Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder. Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.