Few hours of surfing on stackoverflow can save you from 5 minutes of reading a documentation
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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StackOverflow is good for:
-
general questions (when you don't know where to look for) eg. how do I go about ...?
-
specific questions (when you know what you want, in simple english) eg. suggest ways I can ...?
-
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:
-
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
Stack Overflow refuses to provide answers for:
- general questions (when you don’t know where to look for) eg. how do I go about …?
- understanding concepts as different people explain concepts differently eg. what is …?
Specific questions and quick fixes are the faster changing kind of knowledge you can have. And Stack Overflow consistently refuses to update old knowledge.
So, in practice, it's good for:
...
But anyway, some ecosystems documentation are worse, so SO wins.
Also SO might mention the documentation is wrong and this is what API XYZ really does.
I feel like memes like these are written by documentation writers. I usually fine what I need way faster in stack overflow than the documentation.
There's really good documentation out there and there's bad/nonexistent documentation. So stackoverflow is going to be a more consistent experience.
Also I think it is a bit of a skill to be able to read documentation well, especially for Jr. Devs that might not have fully grasped OOP.
Totally agree on the skill part. The ability to read documentation and understand it is extremely important. Especially if you need to coordinate with nonprogrammers like engineers, or if you work in fields that SO doesn't cover well like I do.
With chatgpt, I can just have the AI read it for me.
Documentation is more often than not quite bad. Very abstract, hard to understand, few examples if any. Good writing is a skill.
Sometimes you need a quick/clear fix and the documentation doesn't help with that. SO, though, is.
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
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.
Docker, compose!!
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.
When it comes to things that I am not familiar at, going through documentation is quite tedious and feels like walking blind just feeling things. Having a small easy to understand explanation helps a lot even if I have to then further look it up on documentation.
I do things probably the stupidest way imaginable and find someone's git project using a library I need to use and see how they used it.
People that release libraries with demos and use cases are angels, in my eyes at least.
$ sudo Pacman -S <package>
$ man <package>
Turns out the executable is a different name entirely
Are you sure the distances are not swapped?
I certainly wouldn't think possibly badly written and indexed docs without crowd sourced helpfulness indicator where you may or may not find your answer is 1/4 miles, while a concise highly upvoted answer in stack overflow is 21 miles.
working on a project in python now
first ~30 lines are just comment lines with hyperlinks to all the places I've ~~stolen~~ uhhh I mean, sourced, code from. And a solid 40% of them are stackoverflow
Sure looks like the left way
Where does ChatGPT fall into this meme?
I use chatgpt to get me pointed in the right direction and have it provide some basic boilerplate code for smaller tasks
I needed to go through a bunch of .json files and modify various elements
I was able to implement what I needed without google/documentation/stackoverflow
good one. funny
I've been using chatgpt lately, super helpful. Basically Google on steroids
This is the way
This is why things break. Read the docs!
No, instead just read the source. Documentation lies and you might learn some useful tricks by just learning how the figurative cake is made.
Damn you must have a lot of free time to be able to do that
Just having to work with obscure libraries with shitty, outdated documentation.
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