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> Something nix has been de-prioritizing for thirty years! By experience, the nix culture has been "if you do not understand this, you should not be here" This
by js2 8y ago
> Something nix has been de-prioritizing for thirty years! By experience, the nix culture has been "if you do not understand this, you should not be here"
This is an open-source thing. Hardly anyone wants to write documentation that isn’t paid to do so. There’s no glory in it. I first learned Unix on SunOS/Solaris and the man pages were excellent. You could start with “man intro” and learn your way around the entire system from there.
BTW, if you think you’re any good at documentation, open-source needs your help. It’s a great way to contribute.
- jonahx 8y ago> Hardly anyone wants to write documentation that isn’t paid to do so. There’s no glory in it. There actually is glory in it. Many (granted, not all) popular, celebrated open source projects got that way by having a great user experience with intuitive, accessible docs. I actually think that most programmers (even many very good ones) are simply bad at writing docs. They actually can't do it well. Or it would be a monumental effort for them to do it well. It really is a different skill set.
- BurningFrog 8y agoIs writing docs really that different a skill from writing readable code? Or are these "great programmers" not actually that good at that?
- jonahx 8y ago> Is writing docs really that different a skill from writing readable code? It is correlated (though probably not perfectly) with writing readable code. But that is a different skill from writing useful, correct software. That is, you can write useful, correct software whose code is difficult for others to understand and maintain.