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I don’t think that man pages being oriented in a more user friendly manner will lead to programmers making mistakes in subtler areas. You’re basically saying t

I don’t think that man pages being oriented in a more user friendly manner will lead to programmers making mistakes in subtler areas. You’re basically saying that programming even basic things should be hard so that people learn to be thorough, but I think that people will have less time to be thorough on the hard parts of programming if 1) even the easy parts require navigating a needlessly complex mass of documentation and 2) programmers have to spend time fixing all of the bugs caused each week by needlessly complex documentation.

userbinator 8y ago
I'm saying that the strftime() format specifiers for "basic things" are not hard, since they're mnemonics, and anyone who doesn't find it the least bit unusual to use %G instead of %Y when trying to print a year is not paying attention. I do not think the documentation is "needlessly complex". In fact, I just asked someone who doesn't know programming at all, after giving her "%m %d %H %M %S" and saying it was a way of formatting a date, to guess how to add a year in front. She guessed... %y. That's actually the two-digit year, which is close enough --- the point is she didn't say %G or some other letter. I'd almost be willing to bet that if you repeated this exercise with many other non-programmers, you'd find the same result. Then, why would someone be perfectly fine with using %G? To rebut the first sentence of the article, "I have another tale of humans being humans, and getting into trouble when using computer systems", this is not "humans being humans"; it's closer to the "intelligent human losing all semblance of critical thought when put in front of a computer" phenomenon, which certainly deserves further investigation.
- kamikaz1k 8y ago
  You should have asked this person to do the exercise while having the manual in front of them. Perhaps they might have made the same mistake? Regardless, your test was specifically to confirm your bias that the mnemonic is enough to make a correct decision. There have been plenty of discussions about people blindly following authority. Can you really not imagine someone reading the entry and going "ah, that's weird... But ok"?

userbinator 8y ago

I'm saying that the strftime() format specifiers for "basic things" are not hard, since they're mnemonics, and anyone who doesn't find it the least bit unusual to use %G instead of %Y when trying to print a year is not paying attention. I do not think the documentation is "needlessly complex". In fact, I just asked someone who doesn't know programming at all, after giving her "%m %d %H %M %S" and saying it was a way of formatting a date, to guess how to add a year in front. She guessed... %y. That's actually the two-digit year, which is close enough --- the point is she didn't say %G or some other letter. I'd almost be willing to bet that if you repeated this exercise with many other non-programmers, you'd find the same result. Then, why would someone be perfectly fine with using %G? To rebut the first sentence of the article, "I have another tale of humans being humans, and getting into trouble when using computer systems", this is not "humans being humans"; it's closer to the "intelligent human losing all semblance of critical thought when put in front of a computer" phenomenon, which certainly deserves further investigation.

kamikaz1k 8y ago
You should have asked this person to do the exercise while having the manual in front of them. Perhaps they might have made the same mistake? Regardless, your test was specifically to confirm your bias that the mnemonic is enough to make a correct decision. There have been plenty of discussions about people blindly following authority. Can you really not imagine someone reading the entry and going "ah, that's weird... But ok"?