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Agreed 100 times over. My eyeballs are strained from rolling every time I read some very sage person on SO or HN reply to a well-phrased question or comment wi
by jordanpg 11y ago
Agreed 100 times over.
My eyeballs are strained from rolling every time I read some very sage person on SO or HN reply to a well-phrased question or comment with a terse "it's all in the docs".
As if 90% of use cases aren't covered by 5 examples. As if we all have unlimited time to spend on reading docs and manpages and "learning how to use the tools". As if there is some intrinsic virtue to "learning how to use the tools". As if the very purpose of sites like SO are something other than distilling the information in docs into some other, more readable form. As if there are no man pages or docs that are absolutely incomprehensible and worth ignoring.
No, sorry, this attitude is just another manifestation of standard tech machismo: "real men do it the hard way". Good luck with that!
- moron4hire 11y agoShit, I meant to upvote you, but I flubbed my phone and hit the down arrow instead. HN must think this is a feature, considering how long it has been a probelm. But I agree completely. The entire point of computers is doto mechanize doing things, to essentially be "lazy", aka more efficient.
- hk__2 11y agoI’m not saying you shouldn’t use TLDR or StackOverflow. I’m just saying you could benefit from reading the manpage once instead of TLDR 10 times a day. That doesn’t mean you won’t forget most of the stuff and will use TLDR/SO to find it again but at least you’ll be more comfortable using the tool. In the `tar` case if you know what c, x, v, z and f stand for you can cover 99% of the tar use cases because those can be combined. You learn 5 letters and have now access to 8 different commands (`{c,x}[v][z]f`). Learn one more letter, `t`, and you can combine it with your existing knowledge to have 3 more commands (tf, tvf, tzvf).
- ryandrake 11y agoGreat. Then put those options near the top. Why are options on man pages organized alphabetically? What common use case drives that decision?
- hk__2 11y agoWell, in a dictionary words are not listed at the beginning. The alphabet itself doesn’t have the most common letters at the beginning. What we should do is put the manpage examples at the beginning instead of the end.
- nalck 11y agoThe purpose of documentation is to describe the software. It's not machismo, it's the complexity inherent in the system. The man page for tar isn't poorly written, tar has just accrued many options. Of course there may be unhelpful answers to requests for help. It may also be that industrial technology (Unix) is not as simple or easy to use as consumer technology. Tl;dr: Blame the software stack.