Few hours of surfing on stackoverflow can save you from 5 minutes of reading a documentation
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)
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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Looking at you, Docker compose files.
Docs: “make a docker-compose.yaml, it’s so easy!”
Me: “How?? Where?? What’s the syntax?? ANYTHING AT ALL?”
Some corner of a dusty website only three people have visited in the last two years: “here’s the syntax you need to use for these specific use cases, and you can put it anywhere as long as it’s consistent”
Jesus Fucking Christ is it really that difficult to be a little more specific with this kind of thing? This is why I didn’t start using Docker until very recently. Their docs absolutely suck balls for someone who isn’t already familiar with it.
working on a project in python now
first ~30 lines are just comment lines with hyperlinks to all the places I’ve
stolenuhhh I mean, sourced, code from. And a solid 40% of them are stackoverflowdeleted by creator
I’ve read some documention
and it’s often so terribly written, like its written BY and TO someone who already knows everything about it, so its super vague and so basically useless.
a good example on documentation, IMO, is mozillas javascript documentation. that’s great.
i really dont like microsofts C# documentation though. and there’s probably worse ones out there.
(I will add, english isn’t my primary language and the documentation is almost exclusively available in english)
Docs - method returns string.
Stack overflow - 10 years of history of the old and new solutions to the exact problem you have based entirely off the stack trace
Sure looks like the left way
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.
