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This is sometimes a bit infuriating, because due to these online forums, there developed some "common sense" that is factually wrong. I can recount following mi

This is sometimes a bit infuriating, because due to these online forums, there developed some "common sense" that is factually wrong. I can recount following misbeliefs from my head: - Wine is not an emulation - MS-DOS is not an OS because it cant do paging and virtual memory - Microprocessors are not Microcontrollers because they have paging There are also some tinier things like notorious NIH syndrome due to not reading documentation, like the tons of blog articles about SSH features that could all be replaced by ten minutes of reading ssh-keygen(1). I've seen that on IRC, Reddit and HN as well, and i ended up preferring official documentation over anything else what people online say. If this writing sounds like venting, it surely is.

bombcar 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software) - "Wine (formerly a recursive backronym for Wine Is Not an Emulator, now just "Wine")" - depends on how technical you want to get about it, does emulation just mean translating one machine code into another, or can you "emulate library calls"? Official documentation can be a great source, but in things like ssh-keygen there are often just way too many options and so people want "just tell me how to do what I want to do". One of the reasons sane defaults are so important.
- blueflow 4y ago
  Check out https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=emulation&rdfrom=Emulation https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=emulation&rdfrom... Its actually a pretty generic term that is used similarly like "imitation". You can see it used like that in xterm, which is a terminal emulator. For some reason, many people believe it means something like "virtual machine", to the extent that the Wine project needed to rename to avoid being understood as a virtual machine, which is was associated with really bad performance back then. > just tell me how to do what I want to do I think this attitude is part of the problem. Like, when you try to weld you need to know about many details like preventing heat-corrosion and inclusions, otherwise your seam is going to be unacceptably bad. Welders do have training for that reason, but yet we dont apply the same standards to computing.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Both points are spot on - people nowadays forget just how amazing things like Rosetta are; around the time WINE began emulation was synonymous with "slow as hell". The second is why things really need to have sane defaults, especially in cryptography - learning all the why's and wherefores for someone who is NOT a specialist is quite difficult and foot-guns abound. We're just starting to get the idea of failsafes and safe by design in coding, and we need more of it. Too often the answer has been "you're holding it wrong" instead of "oh, wow, the way this is setup you could easily make it insecure". The Unix/Linux philosophy has been a bit hard to grow here; the "you should have known to use --no-foot-gun" mentality can be hard to overcome, especially if you battled through them on your way up.
    - blueflow 4y ago
      If i was a surgeon and "held it wrong" I'd probably get sued or fired. If i was a welder and "held it wrong" I'd get a written warning, which later might end up in a termination. If i use ssh-keygen wrong in production because i did not read the documentation... then its the tools fault for not having sane defaults?
      - bombcar 4y ago
        If you were a pilot and "held it wrong" you'd probably be dead, and Boeing would get away scott-free ... the first time. Somewhere between "everything is a death-trap, learn how to use it" and "this device is perfectly safe, because it cannot do anything" lies the mean we need to hit.
        blueflow 4y ago
        Not reading the available documentation for your tools is neglience either way.
        jacquesm 4y ago
        I'm willing to bet a pretty good sum of money that no professional programmer has read all of the available documentation for all of their tools.
- sgtnoodle 4y ago
  When it comes to names, I prefer not to be too pedantic. Names are for people to communicate with other people, and most humans naturally and successfully cope with irrationality all the time. A more concise, accurate name is always better to start out with when possible, but it isn't always easy. We can all just agree to call it Wine, and appreciate it running crappy productivity software and 20 year old games on our modern Linux computers.
  - blueflow 4y ago
    You can say "We'd need something that emulates the Windows ABI like Wine does" and you will get a misinformed person derailing the discussion. You can explain your tinc mesh setup, but as soon as you call it "VPN" some people will believe its some sort of proxy to hide your IP address while watching porn. You can explain how PHP interacts with the server environment, but as soon as you call it "Server API", some people will think its a machine-consumable REST/Json/Xml service or sth like that. This generates many landmines you might step onto. Sometimes you need to argue total nonsense to work around these people. Painful. So yeah you are right, but it doesnt solve the Problem.
    - sgtnoodle 4y ago
      Well sure, but it seems like there are always going to be quirky, pedantic people to argue with about anything. It seems like the solution to that problem is learning how to strike a balance between patience and honest, critical feedback.
charlie0 4y ago
The biggest issue I've come across with some documentation is that it comes across as too "academic". Yes, it's very detailed, but doesn't immediately answer a very specific question. One good example is the Angular documentation. It's very detailed, but rarely does it answer the question I have. Reading the documentation just leaves me with more questions than I started. Of course, I will say this. I don't come from an OOP background, so maybe that's why it doesn't immediately click. The other problem with documentation is lack of examples. That's why for command line help, I use tldr. 90% of the time, it gives me an example of the exact command I need. Believe me, I get the whole RTFM and for things I plan to use often enough, I will definitely RTFM. But for rarely used commands, it does not make sense to spend even 10 minutes reading arcane documentation. It's much more efficient to skim a blog or two (or use something like tldr), find the command with the switches and copy pasta. The prevalence of these blogs in the results show others think the same way or there wouldn't be so many of them.

bombcar 4y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software) - "Wine (formerly a recursive backronym for Wine Is Not an Emulator, now just "Wine")" - depends on how technical you want to get about it, does emulation just mean translating one machine code into another, or can you "emulate library calls"? Official documentation can be a great source, but in things like ssh-keygen there are often just way too many options and so people want "just tell me how to do what I want to do". One of the reasons sane defaults are so important.

blueflow 4y ago
Check out https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=emulation&rdfrom=Emulation https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=emulation&rdfrom... Its actually a pretty generic term that is used similarly like "imitation". You can see it used like that in xterm, which is a terminal emulator. For some reason, many people believe it means something like "virtual machine", to the extent that the Wine project needed to rename to avoid being understood as a virtual machine, which is was associated with really bad performance back then. > just tell me how to do what I want to do I think this attitude is part of the problem. Like, when you try to weld you need to know about many details like preventing heat-corrosion and inclusions, otherwise your seam is going to be unacceptably bad. Welders do have training for that reason, but yet we dont apply the same standards to computing.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Both points are spot on - people nowadays forget just how amazing things like Rosetta are; around the time WINE began emulation was synonymous with "slow as hell". The second is why things really need to have sane defaults, especially in cryptography - learning all the why's and wherefores for someone who is NOT a specialist is quite difficult and foot-guns abound. We're just starting to get the idea of failsafes and safe by design in coding, and we need more of it. Too often the answer has been "you're holding it wrong" instead of "oh, wow, the way this is setup you could easily make it insecure". The Unix/Linux philosophy has been a bit hard to grow here; the "you should have known to use --no-foot-gun" mentality can be hard to overcome, especially if you battled through them on your way up.
  - blueflow 4y ago
    If i was a surgeon and "held it wrong" I'd probably get sued or fired. If i was a welder and "held it wrong" I'd get a written warning, which later might end up in a termination. If i use ssh-keygen wrong in production because i did not read the documentation... then its the tools fault for not having sane defaults?
    - bombcar 4y ago
      If you were a pilot and "held it wrong" you'd probably be dead, and Boeing would get away scott-free ... the first time. Somewhere between "everything is a death-trap, learn how to use it" and "this device is perfectly safe, because it cannot do anything" lies the mean we need to hit.
      - blueflow 4y ago
        Not reading the available documentation for your tools is neglience either way.
        jacquesm 4y ago
        I'm willing to bet a pretty good sum of money that no professional programmer has read all of the available documentation for all of their tools.
sgtnoodle 4y ago
When it comes to names, I prefer not to be too pedantic. Names are for people to communicate with other people, and most humans naturally and successfully cope with irrationality all the time. A more concise, accurate name is always better to start out with when possible, but it isn't always easy. We can all just agree to call it Wine, and appreciate it running crappy productivity software and 20 year old games on our modern Linux computers.
- blueflow 4y ago
  You can say "We'd need something that emulates the Windows ABI like Wine does" and you will get a misinformed person derailing the discussion. You can explain your tinc mesh setup, but as soon as you call it "VPN" some people will believe its some sort of proxy to hide your IP address while watching porn. You can explain how PHP interacts with the server environment, but as soon as you call it "Server API", some people will think its a machine-consumable REST/Json/Xml service or sth like that. This generates many landmines you might step onto. Sometimes you need to argue total nonsense to work around these people. Painful. So yeah you are right, but it doesnt solve the Problem.
  - sgtnoodle 4y ago
    Well sure, but it seems like there are always going to be quirky, pedantic people to argue with about anything. It seems like the solution to that problem is learning how to strike a balance between patience and honest, critical feedback.

charlie0 4y ago

The biggest issue I've come across with some documentation is that it comes across as too "academic". Yes, it's very detailed, but doesn't immediately answer a very specific question. One good example is the Angular documentation. It's very detailed, but rarely does it answer the question I have. Reading the documentation just leaves me with more questions than I started. Of course, I will say this. I don't come from an OOP background, so maybe that's why it doesn't immediately click. The other problem with documentation is lack of examples. That's why for command line help, I use tldr. 90% of the time, it gives me an example of the exact command I need. Believe me, I get the whole RTFM and for things I plan to use often enough, I will definitely RTFM. But for rarely used commands, it does not make sense to spend even 10 minutes reading arcane documentation. It's much more efficient to skim a blog or two (or use something like tldr), find the command with the switches and copy pasta. The prevalence of these blogs in the results show others think the same way or there wouldn't be so many of them.