Comment by BobaFloutist
Comment by BobaFloutist 10 months ago
Maybe docs should try to be consistently more accurate, up to date, and legible than (even) stack overflow answers ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
Comment by BobaFloutist 10 months ago
Maybe docs should try to be consistently more accurate, up to date, and legible than (even) stack overflow answers ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
I support reading docs first for questions, but man some truly are terrible.
Like cmake. This just vomits a dissertation at you for each function without really ever saying what it does or how to use it. That’s why there’s so many different sites and GitHub repos with samples. 95% of which are completely out of date (which is a problem cause people looking for these samples probably aren’t on the ups with being able to tell if they’re out of date)
None of that matters if it doesn't show up first or second in Google results.
I have heard this said by many people: “I don’t look at documentation because it usually is inaccurate/out of date”
There’s plenty of people sharing anecdata about bad docs, and I’ve dealt with my fair share. But my anecdata is that engineers who habitually go to the docs directly and read them gain a better understanding and write better software than those who do not. I believe that most software for engineers has documentation that is more informative than stack overflow and blog posts.