[ruby-talk:02432] Re: Please join me, I'm Hashing documentation

On 10 Apr 2000, Dave Thomas wrote:

> mrilu <[e-mail]> writes:
> 
> > I'm sure there'll be discussion how we can join our forces for better 
> > world(tm), but I wanted to act in hurry. So I list all the routines declared
> > in hash.c's Init_hash() which are not mentioned in the docs.
> 
> For what it's worth, we're hoping to be able to put the reference
> sections of our book online. For hash we're currently documenting:
> 
>     [ ] new == [ ] [ ]= clear clone default default= delete delete_if
>     dup each each_key each_pair each_value empty?  fetch has_key?
>     has_value?  include?  index indexes indices invert key?  keys
>     length member?  rehash reject!  replace shift size sort store to_a
>     to_s update value?  values
> 
> Of course, we have to _finish_ the book first ;-)

Dave, I appreciate your efforts and full documentation made by few persons
is without any doubt much better. But I'd like to see this continue as
cooperative effort of the Ruby community for various reasons. 
I think I mean time after your book release when I talk about continuation.

But I see few problems on your approach, which you might have solved already.

Your book takes some time, documentation made during that time might
not only improve your book but help middletime newcomers.

People have time and then again get something else very important to do. 
So I think it's quite unlikely that documentation generated by you will be
updated for following years. It is, however, no problem for community 
at large to keep documentation updated.

So what will be your publishing policy for the reference? I could 
easily contribute to your book efforts (for free), as long I'm totally 
positively sure those lines of documentation won't be covered some 
nasty legalties and basically be freezed to your web page. If you could 
release the reference part to public domain people could contribute 
and fix it (especially when Ruby changes) and you could still publish 
it and get your money. I, for one, would buy the paper version for sure. 

Of course you could not stop anybody else to publish it too, but I doubt 
one could profit by doing so. Programming Perl is The Camel Book and 
yours will be the same for Ruby (in English world). Nowadays the
Perl book market has exploded but the Camel book keeps it's magical powers
and the reference count for it just increases all the time.

Nevertheless, I'm sure community needs and will produce it's own reference
if your will be restricted somehow from wider use. Don't take this as
an offense, but as my uneducated guess what might happen. :)

----
Most of my discussion here was based on the fact that your excerpt 
was missing hash.reject which was the ignition point for my exploring. :)