Documentation

I wonder if there might be a value in creating a forum for documentation issues.   There are periodic remarks here and on PEG about example code in the documentation which is dubious in terms of good programming practice.  As far as I know, none of these comments ever lead to changes in the actual documentation.  In a way, this is understandable since I am sure that the documentation folks are scrambling to create documentation for new features .. whose specificiations keep changing ... and probably the source of the code examples puts more stress on showing a specific construct in as few lines as possible, rather than providing a model for good ABL programming.   But, I would think there was an opportunity for one person or a part of one person to both periodically revise old examples that had been identified as showing bad practice.  And, possibly this could be coupled by developing a program to review new examples by a customer panel selected to represent good practice.  Once that sort of thing got working, one could even tackle projects like reviewing a particular chapter.

What specifically made me think of this is the example on page 224 of the OOABL manual which shows newing a helper class in a constructor.  To me, one should never do anything in a constructor that can possibly fail because one is left with an object that one thinks exists, but doesn't.  Much preferred, I believe, is to do any such work in a separate Initialize method, where handling the errors and the object existence is much clearer.

Of course, the problem may be that there would not be a consensus on what was good programming practice ...

But, it would also be a potentially interesting byproduct of such an effort to have a web site where one published each new discussion about what was good practice, including any dissenting opinions and reasons.