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The whole point, which you are missing, is to make the API simple and obvious for a naive reader, which is most of us. Not everyone is as immersed in Unix and
by wffurr 8y ago
The whole point, which you are missing, is to make the API simple and obvious for a naive reader, which is most of us. Not everyone is as immersed in Unix and C culture as you clearly are.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kazinator 8y ago> make the API simple and obvious Note that make the API is a very distinct activity from document the API, which is what is being criticized here. A better API would use long identifiers for all weird stuff like %{iso-week-based-year} instead of %G. > Unix and C culture I'm confident I could properly understand an above-par engineering document written in plain English, such as what is being criticized here, from any branch of computing. You can't pin this on Unix and C culture. Those man pages are documenting this weird ISO "week-based year" about as well as can be. If you read documents in such a manner that you drop random adjectives (such that "week-based year" looks like "year" to your eyes) and ignore anything in parentheses as being optional such as "(see ...)" notices, that's a comprehension problem. If the descriptions were not sorted alphabetically, that would also be criticized as unfriendly. Users would have to exhaustively scan that section when trying to decipher a format string that someone else wrote.