Comment by feoren

Comment by feoren 5 days ago

Essentially yes, that's correct. Your mistake is thinking that the outcome of those months of work is being able to kinda-probably fix one single bug. No: the point of all that effort is to truly fix all the bugs of that kind (or as close to "all" as is feasible), and to stop writing them in the first place.

The alternative is paradropping into an unknown system with a weird bug, messing randomly with things you don't understand until the tests turn green, and then submitting a PR and hoping you didn't just make everything even worse. It's never really knowing whether your system actually works or not. While I understand that is sometimes how it goes, doing that regularly is my nightmare.

P.S. if the manual of a library you're using is 700 pages, you're probably using the wrong library.

earnestinger 5 days ago

> if the manual of a library you're using is 700 pages, you're probably using the wrong library.

Statement bordering on papyrophobia. (Seems that is a real phobia)

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feoren 5 days ago

More like fear of needless complexity and over-broad scope, which is actually rampant in library design.

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- earnestinger 4 days ago
  
  700 page manual can be produced in several ways.
  - Scope of the library is massive
  - very peculiar way of writing, with lot of impressively unnecessary description of minute detail, that the reader starts counting not only sheep but also breaths until the ultimate end before finishing a sentence. (I.e. Unnecessarily verbose)
  - very extensive docs describing things from various angles including references, topic based how tos and such.
  (I agree that the last one is the least likely, but there is always hope)
  
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