Let's not lose sight of the fact that reducing the slope of the learning curve for Csound could bring in new users because many, if not most musicians, now are at least familiar with making music on computers with some sort of software!

Regards,
Mike

-----Original Message-----
>From: Richard Dobson 
>Sent: Jun 2, 2008 2:17 PM
>To: csound@lists.bath.ac.uk
>Subject: [Csnd] Re: Re: Re: Newbie (sort of) Questions
>
>Jim Aikin wrote:
>
>> 
>> I don't mean to quibble over the meaning of the word "tutorial," but I think
>> we may be talking at cross-purposes here. Most of my work involves
>> commercial music software (Live, FL Studio, Reason, whatever). These
>> programs come with manuals, and the assumption behind the manual is -- or at
>> least, we're entitled to hope that the assumption will be -- that the manual
>> will tell you everything you need to know to use the software. When this
>> assumption becomes inoperative, the manual will say something like, "To
>> learn how to insert the effect in your DAW, consult the DAW manual." The
>> customer should NEVER be left to hit google and find an article in
>> wikipedia!
>> 
>> By that measure, Csound has some very good tutorials on specific aspects of
>> the system. But by that measure, it has no manual.
>> 
>> 
>
>On the other hand, all those manuals assume all sorts of other prior 
>knowledge - how to launch an application; how to use the finder to 
>search for/organize soundfiles; use of Alt/Option/Ctrl etc, how to use 
>the mouse to click on things (sometimes once, sometimes twice); 
>drag'n'drop (or not); in short all the routine GUI operations people do. 
>  To say nothing of the special steps to be taken when exchanging files 
>and folders between platforms.  The difficulty with Csound is simply 
>that it marries (now) ~some~ gui-mode ways of working (not necessarily 
>idiomatic to each platform (GUIs can be as opaque as any CLI system to 
>new users) with ~some~ of the old-fashioned CLI stuff. It would be just 
>as reasonable to criticise the Apple documentation (say) for burying the 
>existence and use of Terminal so well (not a default widget in the dock, 
>for example), that people may use the machine for years never being 
>aware of it.
>
>Whole books have been written, for example, about the bash shell; any 
>"concise" documentation on basic shell usage is bound to simplify things 
>probably to excess, omit possibly useful information, and at worst may 
>even be misleading.
>
>So while there is certainly a need to include some discussion of CLI 
>usage for each platform in the manual, it cannot tell the whole story 
>unless it is on a truly epic scale!
>
>
>Richard Dobson
>
>
>
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Michael Gogins wrote:
> Let's not lose sight of the fact that reducing the slope of the
> learning curve for Csound could bring in new users because many, if
> not most musicians, now are at least familiar with making music on
> computers with some sort of software!
> 

Indeed. I think what I am trying to say is that in writing "full" Csound 
documentation we are perforce having to teach people about computer 
operation ~in general~, the more so as computers increasingly become 
regarded as appliances (media center etc) with a statistically favoured 
set of default tasks (mail, wordproc, internet, games, photo printing). 
Actually computing things with, um, a computer, has become a somewhat 
scary concept!

The irony for me as a Brit is that in the 1980s, schoolkids (and brave 
TV viewers across the land) knew very well all about that sort of thing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro



Richard Dobson