I don’t mean to sour the funny, because it is funny/sad indeed, but
If you know you want the info from the official docs, why not do a search that forces results from that site, or search just for the official docs and then find the page you’re after on the docs themselves?
To be fair, back in the day you could get better results by relying on Google with site:foobar and the Boolean/"power user" stuff. A lot of built-in search boxes on sites were a bit dodgy, or at least less flexible than AND/OR/NOT and other "power user tricks".
Of course, these days those seem to be ignored wholesale and even "verbatim quotes" are an utter crapshoot, this was back when Google didn't fucking blow.
Nowadays I’m pretty sure stuff like site: foobar still works no? Idk I use ddg so I can’t say with certainty but I feel like “basic” power user stuff should still work right?
"site" does work still, I think, just plus a lot of irrelevant drivel - standard Google fare, you see it on Youtube too.
I'd consider the most basic case to be, specifically, the "quotes for verbatim results", which definitely do not work anymore. Neither does + for a positively (hue hue) required term, a close second.
Go really does do well in the zero-to-hero case, that’s for certain. Unfortunately it doesn’t fare nearly as well in terms of ease when it comes to continued development.
Go has a heavy focus on simplicity and ease-of-use by hiding away complexity through abstractions, something that makes it an excellent language for getting to the minimum-viable-product point. Which I definitely applaud it for, it can be a true joy to code an initial implementation in it.
The issue with hiding complexity like such is when you reach the limit of the provided abstractions, something that will inevitably happen when your project reaches a certain size. For many languages (like C/C++, Ruby, Python, etc) there’s an option to - at that point - skip the abstractions and instead code directly against the underlying layers, but Go doesn’t actually have that option.
One result of this is that many enterprise-sized Go projects have had to - in pure desperation - hire the people who designed Go in the first place, just to get the necessary expertice to be able to continue development.
Ananace and the article they linked are using their dislike of Go to conclude that it’s a bad language*. It is not a bad language. Every language has hidden complexity and foot guns. They don’t like Go. Maybe you won’t like Go. That’s ok. But that doesn’t make Go a bad language. The language designers are very opinionated and you might dislike them and their decisions.
I haven’t used Rust but from what I’ve seen, it’s a lot less readable than Go. And the only thing more important than readability is whether or not the code does what it’s supposed to do. For that reason I doubt I’ll ever use Rust outside of specific circumstances.
*I’m using “a bad language” as shorthand for “a language you shouldn’t use”. Maybe they don’t think it’s bad but amounts to the same thing.
Another reason is kind of a general thing with programming language design: Go, like Java or C, has relatively few concepts in the language and stdlib. This means you’re relatively quick to have seen all of them.
But this also means that for various tasks, these concepts that were left out, would have been the right tool. For example, Go doesn’t have enums.
Generally, it’s still possible to create all possible programs, because of turing-completeness, but it will be more cumbersome and more boilerplate-heavy.
So, as a rule of thumb, the more concepts are provided by the language and stdlib, the more you have to learn upfront, but the less pain you have long-term.
Is there a language that anyone would say really does fare well for continued development or is it just that few people enjoy maintaining code? I’ve maintained some pretty old Go programs I wrote and didn’t mind it at all. I’ve inherited some brand new ones and wanted to rage quit immediately. I’ve also hated my own code too, so it’s not just whether or not I wrote it.
I have found maintainability is vastly more about the abstractions and architecture (modules and cohesive design etc) chosen than it is about the language.
Rust is extremely geared toward maintainability at the cost of other values such as learnability and iteration speed. Whether it’s successful is of course somewhat a matter of opinion (at least until we figure out how to do good quantitative studies on software maintainability), and it is of course possible to write brittle Rust code. But it does make a lot of common errors (including ones Go facilitates) hard or impossible to replicate.
It also strongly pushes toward specific types of abstractions and architectural decisions, which is pretty unique among mainstream languages, and is of course a large part of what critics dislike about it (since that’s extremely limiting compared to the freedom most languages give you). But the ability for the compiler to influence the high-level design and code organization is a large part of what makes Rust uniquely maintainability-focused, at least in theory.
If I’m going to inherit a large code base to maintain, I’d like Java, C# the most, Python, the least. Go isnt too bad IMO. I’ve not worked with enough Rust code to really judge it. BTW I like Python but lack of types makes refactoring and discoverability harder
Eh I mean alphabet and Google do have legitimate reasons for antitrust lawsuits, but that’s independent of how shit Google search has become.
Anyway, for those who are fed up with the terrible results, use Ecosia. I’ve basically never needed to use anything else and the advertising money goes towards planting trees responsibly to rebuild ecosystems.
Anti-trust is not about seeking perfection, it’s a defense against abuses of power. That’s a good thing unless you like to be abused by the powerful, in which case lick some more boots.
Haha, nope. The links points to a table of contents after which you are on your own. The right link should point to a specific page instead, but the problem here is that postres docs are poorly optimized for search engines. If you click on the top link from google, you would see there’s a notice that the page is outdated, with a link to a current version, but said link is dead. It’s not an issue I’ve ever experienced with mysql docs for example.
And yes, w3schools, despite how terrible it is, is still above the official docs because it is more popular with newbies. I remember a time when I just started, I preferred sites like it, because they were simple and on point, rather than technically correct and comprehensive like the official docs are. If you forgot the feeling, try learning math on wikipedia (assuming you don’t have a math degree).
For the rest I cannot argue. Generated/AI shit is indeed ruining the internet and search engines giving up and joining them isn’t helpful either.
After which ctrl+f " in" takes you to the correct chapters. I do agree that a direct link would be more helpful.
And for learning postgresql I agree it isn’t very helpful - using their tutorial links, w3schools or something like udemy if you prefer video format is the way to go in that use case.
I remember back when you were told to learn to work with the documentation, not memorize it, because you will always have access to it as a reference. Maybe bookmarking reference books/documentation will make a come back as the search engines degrade.
" in" appears 25 times on the page to be exact, with 16 of those being in the table of contents and 9 being in the text afterwards.
“in” appears 54 times, as you know end up hitting “string” and so on.
Had I known that the functions table of contents was as short as it is I would probably have just scrolled.
Kagi only lists postgresql.org for the first 10 entries, but outdated ones in first place. With the programming scope it collapses all official do s entries to one, with GH and SO filling the rest.
For the quick answer, it also uses the ‘outdated’ docs as source, but as it only gives a very shallow overview there shouldn’t be any difference in version (i.e. it checks for a value in a list in all versions the same, and quick answer leaves out details specific to different versions)
Get with the times. When Google isn’t a useful tool anymore, use a different one.
Curate and maintain your own list of links to official documentation.
I think we’re almost at a point where having a library of books next to your workstation would be beneficial again.
It showed up for me about a month ago. I put up with it for about a week and then broke down and finally switched all my browser search engines to duckduckgo.
The funny thing is, I tried making this same switch a couple years ago. I legitimately had a harder time getting the results I needed and ended up switching back to Google.
I was looking up some tips for Baldurs Gate missions and these fking AI generated pieces of shit with hallucinated fake playthroughs ruined the whole experience.
There has been something similar for years: a page that basically says “Yeah, nah, we don’t have any information for that, but you might be interested in a totally irrelevant something else”, but phrased in a way that gets it high in the results. What’s astonishing is that Google doesn’t punish those pages.
Interestingly, bing of all things turns up better results than Google with the same search terms, first 3 blocks are “popular results”, first is tutorial sites, second is w3 schools and third takes you to the current docs for functions and operators.
If you ignore those, the fourth result takes you to the current docs for comparison functions and operators. I’d prefer it taking you right to the official docs on the first result, but comparatively acceptable. It was memed to death but I’ve seriously found it more useful than Google these days, comparable to ddg’s results.
If you’re going through that route, SearX beats everything and it’s not even close. It’s self hosted and takes search results from any engine you check in a config, different config for search categories, … Rn I’m mostly getting results from brave, qwant, and duckduck. Gotta acknowledge the bing copilot tho, it’s pretty decent, but requires to use edge or bing app in android, so i only use it when I’m lazy or I’m searching for something too obscure for searx.
I’ve used Bing for a few years for the free rewards points and purchase rebates, and it has worked very well for me when it comes to normal searches including searches for software development. I very rarely have to turn to Google when trying to look something up, and as you mentioned, sometimes Google honestly gives me worse results. I will say however that I have found the image and video search on Bing to be significantly worse than Google’s (which I already have some issues with). Not sure about the other search types like shopping or news since I never use them.
I have a half thought that maybe bing works well for technical searches because it’s the default search engine for edge and depending on the company, you may or may not be able to use a different browser and I’ll be real, I tend to leave my work laptop setting as default as possible unless particularly awful.
i read something a few years ago, that it was better, because bing don’t have many users, so they couldn’t rely on AI, and because everyone was using google, sites didn’t optimize for bing SEO, not sure how much time it has, with microsoft obsession with AI
read the official docs, and don’t use google anymore, seriously, any technical question duckduckgo/ecosia can answer better because they use bing search engine
It would be funny, if it weren’t painfully true. DuckDuckGo sucks just as bad as Google. I hear there is a good search engine, but it costs money to use. Shocking. Maybe they are all the same company, making shitty free services to try to steer you to paying for better services.
Not the one you replied to but they’re probably talking about Kagi. I crunched the numbers a while back and the higher tiers were kind of hard to make worthwhile, however iirc they simplified the pricing slightly since then.
I’ve been using it for a few months. It’s good. I get the official docs for my first result using OP’s query. 300 queries, their starting tier was not enough for my use. I was using DDG before and like it well enough. I’m not sure if it’s worth it but I like the idea of paying for services I use. I stopped using Google years ago because of all the captchas I had to fill due to my VPN
I’m cool with paying for quality, ad-free service but I feel like they’re giving way too little for what they’re asking. 300 searches a month? What is this AOL?
Someone has to pay lemmy. If you don’t, it’s comparable to a free tier of a paid service. When I say “you” I don’t mean every single person. There’s no option to pay for google search that I’m aware of.
Not true because we’re getting the same experience whether we pay or not. The same kinda goes for google, they have other services you could pay to support them (please don’t), and it won’t make the search engine better. Big difference is one of them is actually free (full meaning of the word) and the other one is just usable without paying.
You’re still using a free platform to say good free software is not a thing tho, kinda weird.
So many SEO trick to put yourselves into top google search for traffic.
I have google for bug and stuff, and most common bug can be found on shitty content Java tip page with broken format, lot of ads, and sometime untrue/outdate information.
While most people on Lemmy are going to know what this means, the person who wrote this error message was definitely trying to be cute with that phrasing.
So my first role as a developer I’m working on an application that runs various classes for children, the parents sign up but it’s children they’re booking for.
We use reactstrap and there is a package called buttonasync and it has a method of executingChildren, let’s say I was a little confused.
programmer_humor
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.