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Re: [lojban] Re: Towards Lojban for Beginners version 2.0
Adam Chevalier wrote:
My brain must have hiccuped, I meant fu'ivla.
I'm just trying to provide constructive feedback for la gleki.
They are one of a very few people that seem to have the time/drive/both
to do work on Lojban right now and I wanted to help steer the work in
the right direction.
Something I've noticed on this board is a strong rejection of any kind
of change.
Almost comes across as "Lojban is perfect! Everything that the LLG has
done is absolutely fine! We don't need to improve on our methods!"
I felt that I could offer a helpful point of view as a beginner.
If you want to improve your product, ask the customers.
(obvious caveats about customers not knowing what they want/need of course).
Lojban is not perfect.
For one thing, there is no such thing as a perfect language.
Not everything that LLG has done is perfect, nor necessarily even
"excellent", though the stuff that most people see, like LFB, have been
reviewed so often by so many people, that the presumption should be that
it is the best that we can do AT THIS TIME with our limited resources.
The tradeoff is always between writing something new starting from
scratch, vs continually trying to fiddle with what has been done in
search of "improvement". My experience has been that the latter seems
easier to many people but if the changes are made by someone other than
the original author, the "improvement" may not actually be better.
If we need to improve upon our methods then the improver should start
anew, rather then presuming that they fully understand that which they
are trying to improve.
I like to see suggestions, but I much prefer do-ers to suggest-ers,
because we have such a shortage of the former.
We do get lots of feedback from our "customers", but for the most part,
they usually give that feedback when they are still so new to the
language that it takes too long to explain why their suggestions are not
optimal (even if they reflect what they want/need), so people tend to
brush off the remarks in ways that you may find offensive. It takes
time and energy to do public relations well, and none of us are
professionals in that realm.
The problem is that we are all volunteers, working out of love for the
project and/or the community. While a limited amount of money is
generated, it isn't enough to pay anyone, or even to reimburse all of
their expenses, so we rarely focus on the priorities of traditional
business entities, such as "pleasing the customer". We don't even have
enough time to please ourselves, which should be an easier job.
lojbab
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