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It’s really hard to care about people who consider waiting for a webpage to build, a browser to load and a search to be typed as an acceptable solution to docum
by arghwhat 5y ago
It’s really hard to care about people who consider waiting for a webpage to build, a browser to load and a search to be typed as an acceptable solution to documentation access.
- alexvoda 5y agoThat argument doesn't work both ways. One group has far more stringent requirements than the other as evidenced by your use of the word "acceptable". Web documentation is easy to produce and is acceptable to many. All other kinds of documentation can also be converted into web documentation, therefore you do not have to spend extra effort for it. Terminal documentation is more difficult due to the limitations of displaying things in the terminal, therefore it requires more effort.
- arghwhat 5y agoI’m sorry, what? I certainly agree that those who prefer terminals are a subset of developers - despite this missing the point of terminal-friendly documentation also means generally reusable and integration friendly, unlike a full web application - but terminal documentation is objectively orders of magnitude less work than writing web app for showing documentation. Terminal documentation just means plan text. You print it, that’s it. Making it pretty involves indents and line wrapping. Any source formatting is just ignored.
- throwamon 5y agoWho said it has to be a "full web application"? Where are the orders of magnitude more work in parsing text and saving it as HTML files?
- arghwhat 5y agorustdoc, the tool being discussed, generates a full, interactive web application as documentation. Plus, while one can dump plain text to HTML files it's still easier to just print the text.
- staticassertion 5y agoIf it were orders of magnitude less work to get the same results in a terminal that you get in a browser we wouldn't have browsers.
- arghwhat 5y agoI'd love to know how you arrived at that conclusion, as it seems extremely illogical. Text based interfaces and terminal applications came first exactly because they are simpler than web browsers and applications. We're not talking about a "TUI" app here - a terminal doc tool just dumps plaintext and terminates.
- staticassertion 5y agoThat's how 99.99% of the population interacts with computers. They load a web page and then view it.
- lijogdfljk 5y agoFwiw people aren't building the webpage on demand. They're doing it on entry to the project, and so it's already ready when you want it. Rust takes forever to build too if you've never built the project before, but most people also build that ahead of time too. Repeated doc usage and repeated builds/checks don't require the "full build"
- pjmlp 5y agoIt is 2022, welcome to the future.
- arghwhat 5y agoYeah it sucks… :(