Few hours of surfing on stackoverflow can save you from 5 minutes of reading a documentation
good one. funny
$ sudo Pacman -S <package> $ man <package>Turns out the executable is a different name entirely
To be fair, documentation is very often a much longer route to understanding your specific use case. At the same time, SO is responsible for far too much cargo cult programming and I fear ChatGPT will be the same for this.
And there are way too many projects where the documentation is nonexistent or bare to the point of being counterproductive to wade through. I’ve seen way too many open source projects that purport to have documentation but when you open it, it’s just doxygen run over the raw source files with barely any documenting comments in them. If I wanted to see only the names of the classes and functions I’d just pop the source in an IDE, the point of documentation is to point out everything that isn’t immediately obvious just looking at names and to give examples.
“Self-documenting code” is the biggest lie we tell ourselves to get out of writing actual, necessary documentation.
This is why things break. Read the docs!
This is the way
I feel like memes like these are written by documentation writers. I usually fine what I need way faster in stack overflow than the documentation.
There’s really good documentation out there and there’s bad/nonexistent documentation. So stackoverflow is going to be a more consistent experience.
Also I think it is a bit of a skill to be able to read documentation well, especially for Jr. Devs that might not have fully grasped OOP.
Totally agree on the skill part. The ability to read documentation and understand it is extremely important. Especially if you need to coordinate with nonprogrammers like engineers, or if you work in fields that SO doesn’t cover well like I do.
With chatgpt, I can just have the AI read it for me.
Where does ChatGPT fall into this meme?
I use chatgpt to get me pointed in the right direction and have it provide some basic boilerplate code for smaller tasks
I needed to go through a bunch of .json files and modify various elements
I was able to implement what I needed without google/documentation/stackoverflow
StackOverflow is good for:
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general questions (when you don’t know where to look for) eg. how do I go about …?
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specific questions (when you know what you want, in simple english) eg. suggest ways I can …?
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quick fixes with more than one suggestion eg. I get this error, how to fix and please explain.
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understanding concepts as different people explain concepts differently eg. what is …?
Documentation is good for:
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details (when you need to know more and when you really know what you need)
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features (find a list when you want to know what else you can do with it)
Stack Overflow refuses to provide answers for:
- general questions (when you don’t know where to look for) eg. how do I go about …?
- understanding concepts as different people explain concepts differently eg. what is …?
Specific questions and quick fixes are the faster changing kind of knowledge you can have. And Stack Overflow consistently refuses to update old knowledge.
So, in practice, it’s good for:
…
But anyway, some ecosystems documentation are worse, so SO wins.
Also SO might mention the documentation is wrong and this is what API XYZ really does.
Another thing stackoverflow is good for is if you’re like 14, don’t really know programming that well and can’t quite comprehend what you’re doing but know how to copy and paste code then fidget around with it until your ide stops complaining and it compiles and all works together.
I’m offended you think I’m 14
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When it comes to things that I am not familiar at, going through documentation is quite tedious and feels like walking blind just feeling things. Having a small easy to understand explanation helps a lot even if I have to then further look it up on documentation.
I do things probably the stupidest way imaginable and find someone’s git project using a library I need to use and see how they used it.
People that release libraries with demos and use cases are angels, in my eyes at least.
I’ve been using chatgpt lately, super helpful. Basically Google on steroids
Sure looks like the left way
Are you sure the distances are not swapped?
I certainly wouldn’t think possibly badly written and indexed docs without crowd sourced helpfulness indicator where you may or may not find your answer is 1/4 miles, while a concise highly upvoted answer in stack overflow is 21 miles.
Documentation is more often than not quite bad. Very abstract, hard to understand, few examples if any. Good writing is a skill.
Sometimes you need a quick/clear fix and the documentation doesn’t help with that. SO, though, is.
No, instead just read the source. Documentation lies and you might learn some useful tricks by just learning how the figurative cake is made.
Damn you must have a lot of free time to be able to do that
Just having to work with obscure libraries with shitty, outdated documentation.
