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Yep, especially when so many instances of TFM were awful. Perl's docs were fantastic, or so at least I thought at the time, but they were the first large open s
by kstrauser 1y ago
Yep, especially when so many instances of TFM were awful. Perl's docs were fantastic, or so at least I thought at the time, but they were the first large open source project docs I devoured. I can imagine someone coming from another language not even considering just looking at the man page because they were used to awful documentation.
- broken-kebab 1y agoYou are right, Perl's docs are so unusually good that newcomers can't believe they don't need the internet to find clear answers, and go searching/asking anyway, sometimes in wrong places. FreeBSD has the same problem: plenty of its new exploring users dismiss the most well-intentioned advice to read its excellent Handbook as a sort of joke.
- kstrauser 1y agoI’ve seen that one firsthand! “I want to do a thing.” “That’s in chapter 5 of the handbook.” “Oh cool. Is there a substack or something that explains it?”