“And then we waited to see who, if anyone, would give a shit,” she said.
MacFarlane concluded, "Our elegant approach didn’t work, so we hired a Perl hacker to go dig up the personal details on all 38 accounts that had ever upvoted a Haskell post, and the only one we didn’t know was Seth Briars.
Yeah but have you seen some people’s documentation? I get it’s not a glamorous task but I’ve seen some stinkers before (a heap of properties and methods just thrown on a page with barely any description and no reasonable samples)
I copied and pasted some code from their own docs and it was missing required fields and those fields weren’t clear or documented well. Going into their code helped more but still.
Also, the docs weren’t written with me in mind. It’s like if you were already familiar with it or a previous version because I swear I read it four times.
I have ADHD and I’ll often find myself spending hours trying to find a fix, finally read the docs, get distracted, go back to finding a fix without the docs, remember that I was in the middle of reading a docs, and repeat
I usually get distracted reading one of the different APIs in the documentation and went down on a rabbit hole reading the whole history of some totally unrelated thing that just popped into my head and then realized what I had to do when I was going to bed and I ended up working thru the night.
The other times I got stuck for a couple of hours looking for new themes for my code editor because I didn’t like how my current theme looked.
It actually kinda is. GPT-4 has an enormous token size so you can upload the whole documentation of a framework or program and ask it specific questions to it
GitHub Copilot just got an update increasing the token to 8k so I think it can be queried to help you with something similar. I haven’t had the chance to test it further after the new update.
Yeah, the knowledge that 6 hours of debugging can save you from 10 long and extenuating minutes of reading the documentation. That one you can only get by fixing the problem.
Docs can only really help you if your problem is “I have used X from the library Y, yet I do not understand the baseline definition of X sufficiently and this is causing issues”. A lot of problems in practice are much more fundamental than that
programmer_humor
Newest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.