Consider posting beginner GF questions on Stack Overflow

[Inari Listenmaa]

Hi all!

As many of you have found out the hard way, GF error messages are hard to google.

What do we do with all other programming languages when we have a problem? We find that someone else had the same problem and has posted it on StackOverflow, and another person has answered.

Now, I don't suggest that we replace this mailing list with StackOverflow. There is great value in this list for reaching the core GF team immediately and precisely. I think that questions like Anna's report yesterday on PGF2 and Python bindings make much more sense to ask on this list than on StackOverflow. Likewise for the more open-ended and theoretical questions, like "is this even possible to do in GF" or "how to create good standards for RGL".

But there are still a lot of questions that are really baffling for a beginner, but who many readers on this list could answer. I'm thinking of "no instance for Foo among Foo" , "cannot unify the information: lincat Foo {bar} with lincat Foo {baz}", "Internal error in GeneratePMCFG" and friends. A new user tries GF, gets an error, googles it, and finds either no hits or a hit on this very list (back in 2010, I thought gf-dev was only for people who *develop* GF the program/PGF libraries, not for people who develop *in* GF). The user is likely to conclude that GF has minimal support and is not worth investing in learning. In contrast, if they find answers on a familiar platform, that is much more reassuring, and lowers the threshold for themself to ask questions.

So my suggestion is: next time you have a problem with GF, even if you solve it yourself after 5 minutes, consider submitting it to StackOverflow. In return, I promise to answer it.
(I could also submit the questions myself, but then I would need to find different people to answer them, and that's potentially a more difficult task for these other people, and they're less likely to go with it, thus making such a configuration less effective.)

There are 2 questions already, sent in 2015 and 2018, so the [gf] tag is well established! https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/gf ^_^

Cheers,
Inari

[John J. Camilleri]

You are right Inari! This mailing list, although public, is somehow a lot harder to find things in (despite being itself hosted by Google...)

Another kind of result that often comes up when searching for error messages is GitHub issues. So to add to Inari's comment, when you come across something that looks like a bug or feature request then GitHub is probably the best place for it. If you're worried that the issue won't get seen, I think it's OK to post a link to it on this list. Many already do this, but it can't hurt to remind everyone again.

John

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[Aarne Ranta]

Great initiatives, Inari and John!

Improving the error messages has been on my TODO list for a long time. But it is not easy, since it often needs more information than the compiler has available.

The next best thing might be a document that lists all the error messages and explains them, gives typical examples on what should be done, etc. This should be much easier. It could be put to a googlable place, as well as visible on the GF web page. Maybe even directly available in the GF shell by adding optional verbosity. I feel some responsibility for this, since most of the messages were created by me around 2003, and very little has changed since then.

This doesn't of course exclude posting to StackOverflow. It would be great to have more GF presence there.

  Aarne.

[Inari]

After 1.5 years, the GF tag has now 10 questions, and 19 people are watching the tag! Thanks Yousef for posting 4 questions recently, I encourage other beginners reading to do the same. As John said, feel free to post a link to your question to this list, if it's not getting attention on Stack Overflow.

In case you're like me and thought that watching a tag means that you get email notifications for it, that's not the case. You need to create a filter, which requires several clicks in unintuitive places. There are instructions how to do it in this thread: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/397170/tag-email-notifications.

Inari