Re: [xml-dev] How to represent step-by-step procedures in XML?

[Shlomi Fish <shlomif@shlomifish.org>]

hi all!

On Sun, 21 Aug 2022 12:23:53 +0100
Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com> wrote:

> > I am seeking a high-level XML representation, one that is understandable by
> > a manager and at the same time is sufficiently detailed that it can be
> > executed
> > 
> >   
> 
> 
> That's the holy grail of computer science - ever since COBOL, people have
> been trying to find a language that was simple enough for managers to
> understand but precise enough to express all the detail. No-one has
> succeeded. I don't think it's a language problem; I think it's an abstraction
> problem. "Managers" want to reason about the process at a level of
> abstraction that doesn't involve the sordid detail (handling of exception
> cases, in particular) that's needed to make the process executable.
> 

I'm reminded of:

1.
https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/fortunes/show.cgi?id=chromatic-about-testing-DSLs

[[[
        I've never used Cucumber in anger, but I thought it was for creating
testcases that could be understood by non-technical clients, so you can
concretely discuss features. If you're writing a compiler then all your clients
will be programmers, so there's no need for such a thing.

    Our clients are the parents, guardians, and teachers of children between
the ages of eight and twelve inclusive.

    The intent of Cucumber is to make readable testcases, just as the intent of
COBOL and AppleScript and visual component programming is to enable
non-programmers to create software without having to learn how to program.
]]]

2. https://twitter.com/shlomif/status/1501078542481821698

[[[

https://mail.perl.org.il/pipermail/perl/2013-December/013452.html - still
waiting for the visual programming revolution. "When will they ever learn?"

]]]

3.
https://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/philosophy/putting-cards-on-the-table-2019-2020/indiv-nodes/selling-for-stupider-ppl.xhtml

[[[
I suggest you sell / develop products for people as smart as you. If you target
stupid people, then:

    You won't eat your own dog food.

    You will practise the Golem effect (= expecting a person to worsen, and
they indeed become worse).

    You will target an increasingly marginal demographic.

    Stupid people can likely afford to pay less, and will require more
hand-holding.

    The word "idiot-proof" [= laymen-proof], after bundled with Joel Spolsky's
advice to permanently fix users-reported-problems, gets a new meaning when some
laymen are tech geeks who have GitHub accounts and are versed in the
command-line, e.g: fortune-mod issue #45 . I may be a "victim" of my own
success.

]]]

(also there is
https://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/computers/web/choice-of-docs-formats/#word-processors
)

> I remember well a conversation with the marketing manager of a cable TV
> company, talking about the process for on-boarding new customers. We kept
> asking "what if" questions, and the manager got quite frustrated: he was only
> interested in the success case where everything went smoothly, and wanted
> someone else to worry about what to do when things went wrong. His staff in
> the call centre were also quite frustrated: 90% of the calls they took were
> dealing with things that went wrong, and that weren't covered by the process
> manual.
> 
> An executable process needs to deal not just with the things that often go
> wrong, it needs to deal with all the things that can ever go wrong, and
> that's a level of detail that most managers simply aren't interested in.
> 
> Michael Kay
> Saxonica


-- 

Shlomi Fish       https://www.shlomifish.org/
Freecell Solver - https://fc-solve.shlomifish.org/

Chuck Norris’s cat does not chase mice. It chases dogs.
    — https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/bits/facts/Chuck-Norris/

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