Few hours of surfing on stackoverflow can save you from 5 minutes of reading a documentation

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.

• 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)

• features (find a list when you want to know what else you can do with it)

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.

Documentation is more often than not quite bad. Very abstract, hard to understand, few examples if any. Good writing is a skill.

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)

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.

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.

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.

$ 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?

good one. funny

I've been using chatgpt lately, super helpful. Basically Google on steroids

This is why things break. Read the docs!

This is the way

No, instead just read the source. Documentation lies and you might learn some useful tricks by just learning how the figurative cake is made.