We (OSDev.org) are in the wrong direction, guys...

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Brendan
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Re: We (OSDev.org) are in the wrong direction, guys...

Post by Brendan »

Hi,
iansjack wrote:
max wrote:Closing the door for beginners makes this community even more elitist; and theres really no need to do so. ;)
Allowing too many trivial threads has exactly the same effect, of limiting the appeal of the forums, just in a different direction. I guess it's a question of whether the site is aimed at experienced programmers, who are prepared to do research but need some resources to help them with OS development, or beginners who don't understand the way that strings work in C and can't be bothered to read the Intel manuals to determine how the stack behaves with different sized operands (and different processor modes).

I may have misjudged the aims of this web site.
You haven't misjudged the aims (plural) of this web site, you've assumed there's only one aim. Specifically; you've assumed that we're only here to help experienced low level (C, C++ and assembly) programmers become OS developers. You've completely overlooked the fact that we're also here to help experienced Java, Python, C#, whatever programmers (who have never had a reason to care about things like pointers, memory management, assembly language, IO ports, device drivers, etc) to become experienced OS developers.

You've also completely misjudged the level of experience. I'm happy to help anyone with at least some experience (as long as they're willing to learn, including being willing to learn to find things in datasheets and CPU manuals if they haven't developed that habit yet). You seem to want to require a computer science degree.

Those beginners you're complaining about? If we treat them with some decency (rather than telling them to go away and read a 3500 page manual in the rudest way possible), then within 1 year at least half of them will become very valuable members of this community.


Cheers,

Brendan
For all things; perfection is, and will always remain, impossible to achieve in practice. However; by striving for perfection we create things that are as perfect as practically possible. Let the pursuit of perfection be our guide.
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Re: We (OSDev.org) are in the wrong direction, guys...

Post by KemyLand »

Just my todays' two cents. I do coincide with Brendan in that "sending newcommers to read 3500-pages long Intel's manuals" is just silly. If you see my previous post, you'll see I go the other way around.

This thread has been too controversial, and I don't know if the moderators moderate the forum, they'll close it. But that'ld be controversial, too...
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Re: We (OSDev.org) are in the wrong direction, guys...

Post by Candy »

This thread has been too controversial, and I don't know if the moderators moderate the forum, they'll close it.
Controversial is what forums are good for. Negativity / hostility is what gets me to close threads.
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Re: We (OSDev.org) are in the wrong direction, guys...

Post by iansjack »

Brendan wrote:Those beginners you're complaining about? ...rather than telling them to go away and read a 3500 page manual .....
Brendan
Clearly one page that needs an overhaul is "Required Knowledge"
10. The Platform: You should have studied the manuals for the processor you will be programming for. They contain the information you need to design your kernel in the first place. Asking for information that can easily be obtained from these documents will only give cause to "Read The (...) Manual" responses, or simply RTFM.
RTFRK ;)
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Re: We (OSDev.org) are in the wrong direction, guys...

Post by Brendan »

Hi,
iansjack wrote:
Brendan wrote:Those beginners you're complaining about? ...rather than telling them to go away and read a 3500 page manual .....
Brendan
Clearly one page that needs an overhaul is "Required Knowledge"
10. The Platform: You should have studied the manuals for the processor you will be programming for. They contain the information you need to design your kernel in the first place. Asking for information that can easily be obtained from these documents will only give cause to "Read The (...) Manual" responses, or simply RTFM.
RTFRK ;)
You'll find that a lot of formal documents (e.g. specification, etc) explicitly define words like "should" and "must". Normally I'd say this practice is silly because these words have well understood meanings. Perhaps I was wrong?

For example, one day I should read the 6 entire chapters about Intel's virtualisation extensions (and if I start implementing a virtual machine inside my OS I probably will). In no way does this mean that I (or anyone else) must read those chapters before writing an OS.


Cheers,

Brendan
For all things; perfection is, and will always remain, impossible to achieve in practice. However; by striving for perfection we create things that are as perfect as practically possible. Let the pursuit of perfection be our guide.
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Re: We (OSDev.org) are in the wrong direction, guys...

Post by iansjack »

KemyLand wrote:Just my todays' two cents. I do coincide with Brendan in that "sending newcomers to read 3500-pages long Intel's manuals" is just silly. If you see my previous post, you'll see I go the other way around.
Why? In the case in point (how many bytes does "PUSH" put on the stack) this is a simple, direct question of fact that is dealt with in two or three pages of the definitive reference to the processor. It's not a question of referring (what should, according to the stated forum rules, be knowledgeable amateurs who are prepared to do research for themselves) beginners to a 3500 page document. Referring people to those manuals is exactly the correct response and is far more productive then baby-sitting as it encourages them to research for themselves and learn not to just use others as a crutch at the first sign of difficulty.

Having read this thread, and the stickies at the head of the forums, together with the "Required Knowledge" article it appears that not only am I mistaken as to the aims of this site, but so also are those who wrote those documents. It is ironic that the author of the thread describing what is required of posters now berates me for behaving according to that post and referenced articles.

If the aim of the site is indeed to babysit newcomers; to teach by rote rather than to educate in the true sense of the word (education to my mind is a matter of leading people to knowledge rather than just doling facts out) then that's fine. But that's not the site that it professes to be. So, first things first. Let's make it clear exactly what the site is for, and what it expects of users, and provide a consistent approach. Let's not tell people in the Required Knowledge that they should "read the manual" and then berate users for suggesting that people should "read the manual".
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Re: We (OSDev.org) are in the wrong direction, guys...

Post by iansjack »

Asking for information that can easily be obtained from these documents will only give cause to "Read The (...) Manual" responses, or simply RTFM
Eppur si muove
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Re: We (OSDev.org) are in the wrong direction, guys...

Post by KemyLand »

iansjack wrote:
KemyLand wrote:Just my todays' two cents. I do coincide with Brendan in that "sending newcomers to read 3500-pages long Intel's manuals" is just silly. If you see my previous post, you'll see I go the other way around.
Why? In the case in point (how many bytes does "PUSH" put on the stack) this is a simple, direct question of fact that is dealt with in two or three pages of the definitive reference to the processor. It's not a question of referring (what should, according to the stated forum rules, be knowledgeable amateurs who are prepared to do research for themselves) beginners to a 3500 page document. Referring people to those manuals is exactly the correct response and is far more productive then baby-sitting as it encourages them to research for themselves and learn not to just use others as a crutch at the first sign of difficulty.

Having read this thread, and the stickies at the head of the forums, together with the "Required Knowledge" article it appears that not only am I mistaken as to the aims of this site, but so also are those who wrote those documents. It is ironic that the author of the thread describing what is required of posters now berates me for behaving according to that post and referenced articles.

If the aim of the site is indeed to babysit newcomers; to teach by rote rather than to educate in the true sense of the word (education to my mind is a matter of leading people to knowledge rather than just doling facts out) then that's fine. But that's not the site that it professes to be. So, first things first. Let's make it clear exactly what the site is for, and what it expects of users, and provide a consistent approach. Let's not tell people in the Required Knowledge that they should "read the manual" and then berate users for suggesting that people should "read the manual".
You misunderstood me. What I meant is exactly what Brendan posted earlier, i.e., you shall provide them with some sort of advice, some way or another, not "go to intel.com and read that full manual!"
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Re: We (OSDev.org) are in the wrong direction, guys...

Post by iansjack »

KemyLand wrote:What I meant is exactly what Brendan posted earlier, i.e., you shall provide them with some sort of advice, some way or another, not "go to intel.com and read that full manual!"
Don't exaggerate and/or misquote me. I never suggested that anyone should read the full manual; just that they should read the relevant 3 or 4 pages describing the "PUSH" instruction. You spoon-feed people all you like, but when the best answer is "read the manual" (and that is almost always the best answer to a direct question about a particular assembler instruction - how many operands does it take?, what addressing modes does it support?, what's its opcode?, how does it affect the flags?, how does it affect the stack?) then that's the best answer to give, IMO. We shouldn't clutter the forums up by repeating what is already in the reference documentation; and we shouldn't have to waste our time instructing people how to compare strings in C.

If you want to turn the site into "A beginner's course in assembler" or "A beginner's course in C" then go ahead. But that's not for me; there are plenty of sites that already do that far better than this one ever can.
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Re: We (OSDev.org) are in the wrong direction, guys...

Post by KemyLand »

iansjack wrote:
KemyLand wrote:What I meant is exactly what Brendan posted earlier, i.e., you shall provide them with some sort of advice, some way or another, not "go to intel.com and read that full manual!"
Don't exaggerate and/or misquote me. I never suggested that anyone should read the full manual; just that they should read the relevant 3 or 4 pages describing the "PUSH" instruction. You spoon-feed people all you like, but when the best answer is "read the manual" (and that is almost always the best answer to a direct question about a particular assembler instruction - how many operands does it take?, what addressing modes does it support?, what's its opcode?, how does it affect the flags?, how does it affect the stack?) then that's the best answer to give, IMO. We shouldn't clutter the forums up by repeating what is already in the reference documentation; and we shouldn't have to waste our time instructing people how to compare strings in C.

If you want to turn the site into "A beginner's course in assembler" or "A beginner's course in C" then go ahead. But that's not for me; there are plenty of sites that already do that far better than this one ever can.
Again, you misunderstood me (did I mistranslated something?). Actually, my opinion is exactly as yours in your last post. I'm not sure why you say I want to benefit the beginners in the first place. That's all but my intentions, remember?
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Re: We (OSDev.org) are in the wrong direction, guys...

Post by remy »

I agree much things seem to be privative, that's why I shared in my last post http://forum.osdev.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=29279
my bootloader I wrote from scratch by myself. On the other hand, loading the C kernel still doesn't work properly, I can't figure out why, once the problem solved I suggest that I can do a newbie by a newbie example on the wiki.
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Re: We (OSDev.org) are in the wrong direction, guys...

Post by SpyderTL »

Since telling people to read the manual obviously doesn't eliminate people asking these types of questions, and there's really no way of knowing how many people actually read the manual instead of asking questions on the forum, maybe we should just comprimise on an appropriate response to those questions.

I say that if you know the answer, and it can be summed up in a sentence or two, then you just answer the question, and maybe tell the OP where they can find more information. For open-ended, design questions, you just tell the OP that it is up to them, and maybe provide a few ideas, or a description of how you would solve the problem.

I would like to mention, quickly, that locking threads because they are extremely simple questions is a bad idea. It is also annoying, because it just means that I have to go and send the person a PM with the answer instead. And no one else will see it, which means that other people will probably eventually ask the same question in the future.

What do you guys think?
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Re: We (OSDev.org) are in the wrong direction, guys...

Post by KemyLand »

I think that's a well-thought trade-off.
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Re: We (OSDev.org) are in the wrong direction, guys...

Post by iansjack »

I'm clearly in a minority of one, but my thoughts are that if someone is not prepared to read the documentation to discover the answer to questions that have a clearly defined answer (as already described), even when it is suggested that this is where the information lies, then they are extremely unlikely to progress further with OS development.

I'd like this to be a site where serious discussion of OS development takes place, not answers to queries such as "Why doesn't 'if (string == "Hello World")' do what. i want it to?" But if others want to clutter the forums up with that sort of trivia, so be it.
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Re: We (OSDev.org) are in the wrong direction, guys...

Post by KemyLand »

iansjack wrote:I'm clearly in a minority of one, but my thoughts are that if someone is not prepared to read the documentation to discover the answer to questions that have a clearly defined answer (as already described), even when it is suggested that this is where the information lies, then they are extremely unlikely to progress further with OS development.

I'd like this to be a site where serious discussion of OS development takes place, not answers to queries such as "Why doesn't 'if (string == "Hello World")' do what. i want it to?" But if others want to clutter the forums up with that sort of trivia, so be it.
I completely agree with you.
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