First of all: I am a mediocre programmer. I am aware of that fact. I don’t try to hide it. But I also know that the majority of programmers out there are mediocre or worse. So I want to be a voice for them (us).

Second of all: I don’t use Ash every day. I use it and then I switch to something totally different because my work asks for it. Between my Ash programming there can be 12-16 weeks of Ruby on Rails programming. Sprinkled with some other programming languages or frameworks. That is the live of a consultant.

I am writing this post to share some light on the main problem people like me have: A ton of documentation we don’t understand. Mainly because most of it doesn’t contain a single working example. Maybe this is a generational problem. Maybe it is a language barrier problem.

Generation Problem

I started programming in the 1980s. In a time without internet. In a time without peers I could ask (I was for a long time the only kid with a computer in my home town). Books about programming were a) expensive and b) had to be ordered from the US (I live in Germany) which was a BIG deal in those times and it took weeks. I mainly learned by reading programs I found in computer journals. On printed paper . For context: My first computer was a ZX 81 and didn’t had a storage devise. I learned not by theoretical explanations but by examples which I refactored. Give me a Hello World! and I thank you! In 9 out of 10 times I use Google to search for an Ash problem. Most times I find a “solution” but one I do not understand. If they included a working example it would make a huge difference. And by working I do mean working. Not something that looks like a working example but actually is missing a couple of key components.

Language Problem

I am German. I feel fine to communicate in English but every now and then I don’t understand a technical term. With a clean and working piece of example code I wouldn’t even have to understand the term. It would make such a big difference.

Bottom Line

I just wanted to share some light into a frustrating situation for us mediocre programmers who want to use Ash but who get stuck so often. If you read a question of us do not assume that we are too lazy to search for the answer but please assume that we really don’t understand what we found and give us a working example code which we can play around with. I don’t need to understand the 100 possible arguments of something. I only need a solution for my problem and from that I can go ahead and learn additional stuff.