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Thomaz
Please don't take this post as a critisism of you. I think Amibroker
is an amazing program but I'm frustrated at the steepness of the
learning curve in coming to terms with AFL.( talking to other people
who are now competent with Amibroker , they have also had similar
probelms )
I've had Amibroker for coming up to two months now and am just
starting to come to terms whith how AFL is structured. I don't have a
problem with how it's structured , and I note in another post you
commented how you'd worked in another company where people would
spend a long time working on small details of the user interface.
Again I don't have a problem with this aspect of the program.
Where my concerns are , are with the manual. My problem is that I've
never done computer programming before , and the manual ( IMHO )
assumes a certain level of computer programing knolwedge.
Eg in the manaul the dot is described as :
" The dot (.) is a member access operator. It is used to call COM
object methods. If myobj variable holds the object, using dot
operator we can call the methods (functions) of myobj object: "
To someone with a non programming background this is confusing to say
the least.
I posted a question about this on the share forum I normally hang
around ( which has an AMibroker section now :) and got the following
explanation
" A modern paradigm in programming is to use 'object-oriented'
techniques - where the data and the code that immediately manipulates
it are written together into the one code module and called by the
different programs that want to use it. Earlier techniques meant that
those programs that wanted to use the data would individually read &
manipulate it, resulting in unnecessary code duplication, possible
inconsistencies and maintenance headaches.
The data relating to an object is referred to as the properties of
that object and the functions utilising it are called methods.
An example would be where a piece of code defined say, a person. You
would create an object in code called Person. It would have
properties like FirstName, Surname, Sex, DateOfBirth - typically
loaded from a database or input by the user. It could have methods
defined for FullName (to return the concatenation of FirstName and
Surname) and Age (to return the difference between the DoB and a date
supplied as a parameter).
You would then refer to the properties in your code as:
Person.FirstName
Person.Surname
Person.Sex
Person.DateOfBirth
and you would call the methods as:
Person.FullName()
Person.Age('23.07.2004')
It will all start making more sense as you read on & come across
examples - you might have to plan on reading those manuals a couple
of times! "
Many aspects of the manual are easily understood eg " built in
functions" and once you start getting an understanding of AFL things
start making more sense, but the initial learning curve is steep.
One way of improving things would be to put more realistic share
related examples in the manual , or maybe doing an AFL for Dummies.
Share programs are notorious for being hard to learn to program , but
if there was a way to shorten the learning curve and make Amibroker
more user friendly ( in terms of learning it ) , I think it would be
another good way to differentiate it from others in the market place
( apart from the fact it's the best ...:) )
As your priority is understandably further development of amibrokers
features , maybe you could see if there was someone who was
interested in doing it. Another suggestion would be to have a
seperate Beginners forum, or a specific archive where posts which
explain basic concepts not covered in the manual , such as herman's
post on the Iif Function
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/amibroker/message/68248
could be collected
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