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----- Original Message -----
From: "Anthony Markatos" <tonymar -at- hotmail -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Sent: Monday, March 13, 2000 12:59 PM
Subject: Re: Ideas in Motion
| Tony Markatos responds to Katie Kearns:
|
| Your class's experience is just further prof that written text is a
| very poor vehicle to use for documenting procedural information. To quote
| Ed Yourdon "Procedure is like dance - it defies written description."
What
| Ed means is that procedure is asychronous - multiple things happening at
the
| same time and multi-decision branching. Text is very poor at describing
| such.
And yet people have been using text-only procedures quite successfully for
years and years.
It isn't that the text is poor in some situations, it may be that the writer
isn't in the same mind-set as the user.
Flow-chart graphics may only further confuse and frustrate the user. You
not only need to know
WHAT the procedure will do, but WHY the user would need to do it.
