[6319] in s-news-athena
S(-PLUS) documentation and ease of use
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Rich Calaway)
Mon Jan 30 18:50:37 1995
From: rich@statsci.com (Rich Calaway)
To: s-news@utstat.toronto.edu
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 1995 15:14:32 -0800 (PST)
Greetings--
As the documentation lead here at StatSci, I've been following the
recent discussions on S-PLUS documentation and ease of use with particular
interest. A number of good points have been made, and valid complaints
registered, and I wanted everyone to know that we have been listening.
We want our documentation to be clear, complete, accurate, and useful.
Whenever we fail to meet any of those goals, please let us know.
I, too, would like to see our online help take advantage of modern hypertext
systems to establish closer links between help files. I would like our
examples to be useful and practical. Most of all, I would like the
information buried in our current manuals made more accessible to you,
the people who use S-PLUS. We are working on all of these problems, but
with a limited staff and a huge documentation set, solutions come slowly.
I plead for your patience--I think our documentation has improved slightly
with every release, and I think it will continue to improve.
You can help the improvement process. If you have any specific suggestions
for how we might improve our documentation, drop a line to doc@statsci.com.
If you encounter an indecipherable help file or useless example, send us
a message. Squeaky wheels get greased, so problems called to our
attention are more likely to get fixed faster than problems we just
"know" are out there.
Thanks for using S-PLUS!
Rich Calaway
Sr. Technical Writer
rich@statsci.com
