Thanks for the reply.
You are right in what you are saying. The goal was to produce a tutorial
which is terse, clear and straight to the point.
With the plan of the tutorial I wrote down a set of words which the
reader should know before reading, which I will add in an introduction.
These word will filter out or prepare the readers, I think.
This will scare off a lot of people. Plus, it isn't how anyone else on
Earth writes. Now, there's something to be said for trying new things, but
trying some things is bizarre for no good reason (such as holding the
tines of a fork in your hand and trying to spear food with the handle).
More importantly, humans can't be programmed this way. And, yes, your
document looks like an attempt at a program. (A flawed, often misspelled
attempt, but that's not the important thing.) Humans like text that flows
and interrelates to itself, not masses of facts shoved at them all at
once. Even geeks, who value high information content, like reading
organized prose.
As I've said, your lack of coherent organization is a huge, fundamental
flaw. It's so deep that fixing anything else would be useless until that
is remedied.
Nothing is proven in the tutorial...
Then why present it like one of Euclid's proofs?
Not gonna happen. Not with humans, anyway.
I think all have the potential to, and I actually think learning is
about pondering on definitions of concepts and not being fed without
thinking..
Being fed is one thing. Being drawn in by crafted prose and actual
organized thought is another.
How about this: Plenty of people write textbooks at an advanced level,
aimed at people who presumably know how to learn and know how to reason.
I'm talking about doctoral candidates, here, not simply run-of-the-mill
college kids. Nobody, but nobody, who writes those advanced books expects
the audience to sit through page after page of unrelated sentences. They
take the time to create paragraphs, sections, chapters, and so on, simply
to make their books usable by human beings.
They don't spoon-feed anyone. They do take the time to make something
worth reading.
Here is a quote about Euclide's The Elements:
"No other book except the Bible has been so widely translated and
circulated."
It has actually been used as a math text book for over a millenia, as a
complete matematics textbook from elementary school up. Its just the
later century or two we have gotten these books which explain everything
extensively, leaving almost nothing to the reader to ponder..
Bah. Learning from The Elements instead of a good textbook is missing the
point. The Elements is an example of formal rigor and a foundation for
future work in the field, and is intended for people who already
understand the field. A textbook is, presumably, meant to prepare the mind
and introduce basic concepts. Not as axioms, but as /ideas/. Its
organization is conducive to humans, not logical methods.
How about this: A bit less than a century ago, Russell and Whitehead
created a book called 'Principia Mathematica'. In it, they go from basic
formal logic to 1 + 1 = 2. They rigorously prove each step, and it takes
them hundreds of pages to reach a result the vast majority of humans grasp
intuitively as infants. Shouldn't we all use that book instead of
arithmetic textbooks?
If you want to see a C textbook done correctly, buy a copy of "The C
Programming Language, Second Edition" by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M.
Ritchie. They don't spoon-feed you, but they do present the material in a
human-readable way. Plus, you'll almost need to read it at some point,
since it's the best book about Standard C. In my not-so-humble opinion,
nobody who hasn't read that book should presume to write his own C
tutorial.
