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sameSameButDifferent
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Did nobody here grew up with documentation as a starting point?
I work with devs who seem incapable of reading documentation. If there's not a tutorial on some random blog, it ain't happenin
Hire an ASMR person to record a reading all of the documentation.
Java Orated Implementation
I used to work with a junior dev that didn't believe or follow a single thing a senior told him. If he read it on some random blog he'd consider it absolute gospel though.
So we put him on busy work until we could convince management to get rid of him.
You didn't consider hosting your style guide on medium? Smh
We did consider launching a blog about the subjects we knew he'd be asking about, but he was obnoxious enough that we didn't really want to help him that much. He would also ignore any bug reports that came from any of the women in the office, and totally ignored the existence of the women on our development team.
Yeah, okay, this escalated from a problem to problematic
wtf that's a very weird behavior.
It really was, I didn't even notice it at first as it was so outside the realms of my experience with people. The boss tried to pass it off as him needing to gain experience in our sort of environment, I think mainly because he was slowly realising he'd made a mistake. Worst hire we ever made, there was a point in his probation that he should have been let go, but they doubled down on him needing to learn. Weird fucking guy.
Ironically knew a guy like that, sure to his being wildly autistic. Refused to work with women and also had issues with the tech leads - he was right though, I came in as a senior Dev and got promoted past those morons quickly. Their codebase was an actual horror show
Documentation is the best reference when you roughly know what you are doing and already have the basic usage of the language + libraries down.
However I don't want to read through thousands of pages of documentation just to create an empty window, looking at you vulkan. A tutorial will give you a working version quickly and it allows you to understand the basic usage way faster. For the details and debugging you have to look at the documentation.
I agree with you on this mostly. However, my issue isn't the use of tutorials, it almost feels like they get stuck in a loop. It seems at times like they can only work from tutorials and they can't find one that comes close to our use case and they either freeze up or they start implementing something that won't work for us.
Sure it's nice to have but if it is mandatory, that is a serious problem
I used to think that I was on this camp, until I found an old school documentation, boy that was an experience all together, it's not that people can't read documentation, it's more like to many companies documentation is an afterthought made by an unpaid intern in his free time... They are really bad.
To be honest there is good and bad documentation. I always considered myself incapable of reading it, but that's because most of it is shit example: - Microsoft docs = Shit to the point of unusability - Jenkins Job Builder docs = Shit, but you gotta work with something (https://jenkins-job-builder.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) - Tracy logs = The best docs ever I read them simply because it was an interesting read (https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy/releases/download/v0.12.2/tracy.pdf)
Tried to do a thing with MS doc recently. Couldn't figure out anything beyond things that are obvious. Couldn't find examples online that worked. LLMs confidently produced non-working solutions. Ended up using implementation that skipped that part altogether.
LLMs confidently produced non-working solutions
Welcome to my world and the reason why I am a bit of an AI skeptic :D
Had a senior dev tell me once, "I don't have time to read documentation, that's what we have people like you for". That explained his code. A LOT.
There are some instances where the documentation legit sucks tho. OR IS BROKEN (right now fastAPI has broken auth documentation) and that sucks. But always read the doc
Problem is, once you start using Open Source Software documentation ranges between great and nonexistant. And sometimes the documentation seems just good enough at first glance, and for someone that already has experience with that framework it is good enough, but for someone who doesn't you notice holes in the documentation where things are just not fully explained.
So you need a tutorial after all, even if there is documentation. Don't underestimate your own accrued knowledge and experience!
Half of what I use Google for is just to look up official documentation. And when I was in high school phones and laptops weren't allowed so I printed out the Z80 assembly docs so I could program my graphing calculator during class. It was slow but not substantially different
Not having stack overflow at all though... I certainly wouldn't have been as successful as a self taught programmer
Last paragraph brings up an interesting point.
I have a degree, and a formal education in programming in C and Pascal. 30 years ago. Now I'm doing c#, Rust, Javascript mainly, all of which is self taught thanks to SO and Google. More recently switched to using Copilot and ChatGPT as reference since it can provide a more relevant answer.
In the end, I guess we are all self taught. AI will disrupt our industry in the same way search engines did.
I work with the opposite problem: there's no documentation. Always a fun guessing game to be had
The issue is that a lot of documentation is just shit. Especially with weakly typed languages it is terrible to work with.
Functions that have documentation that just give you no idea what it actually does.
In those cases I end up spending my time reading through source or decompiling stuff.
Most documentation is a terrible starting point. I always start with a tutorial or example code and then look at the documentation for the details.
It's also a good starting point to inherit bad habits from the tutorials author
In general I would say I haven't found tutorials very useful, I got the majority of my start trying things, googling answers from stack exchange and modifying existing programs written by someone else. As I got more experienced I now mostly rely on docs. Most tutorials I have found were not useful, and I've never been willing to use video sources as it's more of a pain to find the part I actually care about and way too slow.
I also usually actually have a project in mind, so following a tutorial the way it's written is a massive time sink to figure out how to do one part of a project that is already partially written. I have used IDEs from the start and increasingly use their features, but I've also learned new languages in a plain text editor when I couldn't be bothered to take the effort to set up a proper environment.
I started learning programming recent enough that “documentation” was on the internet, and still poses the same dilemma… what, did people in the 80’s and 90’s just have a textbook with the full contents x-language’s standard libs or something?
Getting off topic but still to that point: i hope i was apart of the last generation to use paper for literally any computer science and engineering courses. Even in 2016, it felt rather…obtuse(? If that’s the right word?) to be handwriting java.
I learned programming as a kid in the early 90s from text books in the library and later books I bought myself. And yes, I had to buy books with the full api specs. When I was 12 the Windows API docs were like some kind of bible to me. That book cost me 120 mark lol (I'd guess that would be about 120€ in today's money). Had to convince my grandma that it is a very important investment in my future, which it ultimately was
I imagine updates to languages/frameworks were a little bit less radical too. Especially things like syntax updates and other breaking changes exercised more caution.(not that certain rules didn’t hold up, just that it was harder to cope with breaking changes when your main documentation is a physical medium.)
Most of the windows 3.11 APIs are still valid
I started with YT videos and now mostly refer documentation. I only use YT videos now when it's a tool specific thing, like configuring things in IntelliJ
Video is just such a slow medium, especially if you only have one small part you need and already have part of a project made. Can't easily skim the video or search it.
A good dev will use all the tools. I use docs, stackoverflow and ai tools. The ones that claim that vibecode is the future are the dumb ones.
Reading documentation is still king.
Stack Overflow got its start, because the win32 api docs were so bad.
documentation
You guys are getting documentation?
I always tend to go down the levels, so AI as a first port of call, then google (this includes stack overflow) and then it goes into the bowels of the documentation.
I’m a stubborn twat and will not stop until I have an answer, whatever form it takes
Reading documentation has become a lost art — this includes reading source code.
Many of my colleagues don't know how to read documentation, manuals, or source code from libraries. They don’t even read the code hints that pop up when hovering over a function in the code editor.
I once peeked at a friend who pasted source code into ChatGPT to find an error — even though the compiler clearly stated the issue was an out-of-bounds array index.
This feels like a new tier of clusterfuck: they don't even read the error messages anymore..
man
Alright, Grandad, let's get you back to bed.
At least I get a new job the moment I switch my LinkedIn status to something like "Interested in new whatever the fuck"
They’re called books. We had books.
I have written code using notepad, it was fine
I had to write code in a paper notebook and transcribe it in school when I had access to a computer. Really develops your fear of bugs lol
I learned C that way. My friends older brother was my compiler. I would pass him the notebook and he would error or give me my output.
We got pen and paper Java exams in uni. The teacher idolized some old dude who could write complex java programs line for line, without going back to fix things. So we had to become that.
I started coding in 2021. Had a really really old laptop, couldn't run IntelliJ. So I made a 2D java game from scratch, in sublime text, without auto completion lol.
I also wrote C in Turbo C but that doesn't mean I will ever want to go back to that time except for nostalgia
I have walked before. It was fine.
To be clear this says nothing of the practical utility of running, riding horses, driving cars, or flying in airplanes. Walking is unquestionably fine provided the time at which you need to arrive at your destination aligns well with your average walking pace and the distance you need to travel to get there.
Like of course you can write functional code in notepad, but if you're seriously trying to imply you can use notepad as an IDE and contribute productively to any project with a scale beyond tiny then respectfully you're full of shit.
People can definitely contribute to large projects without a proper IDE, I've dove in to the chromium source without one because I couldn't be bothered to set that up correctly at the time to make some changes and still succeed in doing what I set out to do.
I have written assembly code by hand, it was fine
And yet, actually reading the docs is still the most important skill.
Honestly, what did people use before Google? And don't tell me AltaVista, please! Was it some message board or did just have stacks of docs?
Manuals. On paper, floppy disks, CDs etc.
You had to read the physical manual or go to a man page. You also probably could not feasibly write a program without extensive knowledge of the language specification.
ty, never heard of the man page, i have read few books on the early days of unix and menlo park, but don't think any of that was mentioned. Probably cause the book were always about like 10x guys who seemed to just play around with stuff, till they figured it out.
Its also worth keeping in mind that systems were substantially simpler at the time and there were fewer interacting systems. You could reasonably require a programmer in 1988 to learn the details of every piece of hardware they were coding for (likely only one), every OS they'd be coding for (also just one), and every language they'd be using (maybe two).
RTFM
I got my CS degree in the 90s. Google existed but it wasn't much help in this regard.
We used paper manuals or the docs that came packaged with the libraries we were using. Or we used each other -- if you were stuck finding someone who knew more than you and being like wtf dude I'm gonna fail this shit bail me out often worked.
I wonder how many times the more capable person just stared at you and understood as much as you did
I started JavaScript in 1996 - right at the birth of Google. Found MDN via AltaVista, read through the whole thing, writing little experimental code snippets as I went through. Then picked up OReilly guides as a desk reference and started building things.
Books they were called books.
Check out the Amiga Hardware Reference Manual : https://archive.org/details/amiga-hardware-reference-manual-3rd-edition/mode/1up
haha
yahoo
Askjeeves
Alright settle down Mario
I consider AltaVista, Yahoo lol But like before search engines.
The built-in help in Borland Pascal or Visual Basic 3.
Nobody I knew around me, knew C, when I started out, so I guess I vibe coded... It explains a lot.
I vibe code, but that means Durban poison gummies and 90’s urban music at the same time :)
Visual Basic had a lot of stuff in the F1 (keyboard key) help. All local to your computer.
How did they build the pyramids without all the tech, must be aliens /s
My first job out of college was working for a defense contractor writing B2 bomber mission planning software. Our internet access was restricted, but this predated stack overflow anyway.
How did I build apps? I slowly wrote shitty code, reinventing things that barely resembled wheels.
Devs, uh, find a way.
Google started 1998. I started working 1998, so there's that. Unfortunately there wasn't so much content so we had books, documentation and man pages and probably invented the wheel a thousand times.
In a sense, this encapsulates the fact that future developers will lose competence that we currently have (if we continue to be dependent on these tools).
Yeah, no dude. This illustrates why this opinion is short-sighted and myopic.
I got my CS degree in the 90s just as IDEs were becoming common. When I started we were writing code w/ vi or pico on monochrome telnet terminals. Gradually people started adopting IDEs and syntax highlighting and pretty soon there was a small contingent of sweaty tryhards who insisted that we were all sabotaging our careers and ruining our futures by using "crutches" that were going to rob us of the fundamental skills we would need to succeed "in the real world." Like, how are you going to excel as a programmer if your computer is checking your syntax for you?
Of course the reality is no such thing happened. IDEs, syntax highlighters, linters, debuggers, and etc. were all accelerators. The "fundamental skills" in question were mostly unimportant tedium whose absence allowed us to focus on more important things like, you know, writing code.
I understand what you're trying to say, but I think the current situation is quite different. These new tools are increasingly being sold to us as alternatives to writing code ourselves. At least with IDEs, and syntax highlighting, you still had to write everything yourself.
I get that you've seen this kind of talk before, but that doesn't mean necessarily mean that this is just another case of that. I think this is more of a threat to the our skills than anything that came before because of the level of automation being pushed.
It has already been demonstrated that passing off your thinking to AI makes you dumber and isn't more productive, through research papers.
AI and good old dev tools aren't the same in the slightest.
True, just as we have lost the competence to code in assembly.
This is entirely incomparable. JavaScript and assembly are different languages for different things, using AI to code is letting something else do your job and taking away your chance to learn how to think like a software engineer.
There's lot of engineers that work in IT and don't write a single line of code in their jobs.
The "think like a software engineer" has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with coding. Code is just a tool. If your career is built upon a programming language that's extremely difficult to use because that was all there was back then, that's a you problem.
If you learn to think like a software engineer you can use any language. If you learn to write using AI you can't do anything that hasn't been previously done.
ExpertSexChange.com was really important in my life.
Honestly, programming just used to be a lot harder. I have nearly a decade under my belt and I give huge props to people who wrote code 50+ years ago. They laid the foundation of computation today. Major respect.
I'm a very new programmer, and I mostly use docs. Though, I am completely useless without the docs, they've carried me the entire way so far.
I mean I didn't for the longest time. As a kid in the 80s being the only one interested in computers, not having any reference material and not knowing english it was rough. I did learn som Basic on the C64 and tried making some simple adventure games in Amos on the Amiga. Did formal education in uni and it was still hard. But early 00s I came across Python and it was a joy to use.
There is this thing called the "brain". Most people have one laying around, they just need to use it.
We used stacks of reference books.
We used notepad och vim..
After the assistance of ChatGPT to learn PL/SQL, I asked myself how I would've managed to do that before with that shitty Oracle documentation
Trial and error and Joe Celko - I still recommend his books, even if you’ve already learned, man’s a star
Human language changes and is full of ambiguity.
We? You were coddled by Google, SO, Intellisense, now AI. I grew up with printed manuals, books, and a strong sense of couriousity.
I did my degree exams in pen and paper. this century.
Easy. No 500 frameworks, no virtual environment, no DevOps crap, no service mesh. All you needed to know was in the man pages and a small set of books sitting on your shelf. It was a peaceful life.
What people are effectively doing when they use:
- Google — looking up the docs or auxiliary info based on them
- StackOverflow — asking people to find the docs they're missing or explain the ones they don't understand
- IDEs / IntelliSense / any other static analysis tools — using tools which know what it means to comply with at least some of the docs and warn you when you don't
- Docs (old school) — reading the fucking docs
- AI — disregarding the docs altogether, in favor of a machine that only knows how to guess??
Uphill both ways, in my grandfathers pyjamas
Hahaha, very humorous.
Books. Lots and lots of books
No we don't? They had documentation???
Shocking news: people don't even pull out the paper map and compass anymore. They don't even hold an arm up to the horizon.
Considering how often you read about old code from decades ago that is utterly unmaintainable: they didnt.
Old school devs all crowded around one computer and combined their intelligence.
We do the same now, just online and don’t describe what the scope is
some of you never used notepad and it shows.
Often old code is peace of shit. Only acceptance criteria about code was - its work. Before git devs can easy deploy to production code what dont see anybody except writer.
Interesting attitude... Me as a representative of all three generations... I would say old days programming was way easier cause of the following reasons: * tasks were "simpler" and narrower * it was a lot more unknown (how hw works, how sw api works, what resources are available), but as soon as this is nailed, it is pretty much mechanical work (remember estimation? that's why it was there) * the number of frameworks and libs, apis and patterns was significantly smaller, thus seniority was well defined
Sometime I ask myself the same question.
But then again it's closed and duplicated, so it checks out.
Meanwhile..
They read the docs.
And wrote docs that made sense (that others would read).
We survived these things by learning the framework and language and having basic software engineering skills
Books, man pages, language specs and docs. When I learned I did not even had a persistent Internet connection. So I used the about and a lot of curiosity. I still prefer good written docs to anything else.
Why does it feel like half of the tech industry takes pride in being incompetent at their work and not knowing how anything works?
It's called reading the fucking docs.
I do that when trying to use a new installed package in python. I ain't gonna use AI to make the code.
Feels like cli vs gui all over again. ´our generation is the last one who REALLY understands computers‘
i've been trying to steer myself towards using man and grep as my google, it's worked out surprisingly well.
I'm still perplexed by the people who ask "how can you build a single page app without a framework".
What I wonder is how they made the first text editor
One line at a time. The software was entered into coded paper cards or tapes after they moved from switches to set the machine’s state.
We used to have a room for all the manuals. Get a weird error to get the book and look it up. Hopefully someone else wasn’t hiding the manual in the desk somewhere!
If AI feeds itself with my code, we're gucci. AI is eating all the shit from github
I already feel like that remembering my life without co-pilot.
Oldskool devs have reference manuals.
Before Google I have thick books with every single instruction for Java and what they do. The issue is, they can go outdated. You definitely need to buy a new Java reference book whenever a major release of Java comes out.
I was so happy to finally toss that "C++ programming language" brick by Strostrup once it got outdated enough. Paid a fortune as a student in the 90s and never learned to love C++.
C++ is an acquired taste. I don't know how, tho.
You just gotta pavlov yourself enough, maybe then the taste will finally be aquited
Same way I feel about Rust.
Also, just leave the template metaprogramming stuff to the experts and you'll be fine.
To love Rust, you must try to earnestly love C++ first. After you fail, loving Rust is the easiest thing ever.
This 100%. I was pretty deep into C++ and there were so many small annoyances that I felt should've been done differently, a lot of which couldn't even really be changed due to backwards compatibility. Then finding out about Rust I was just "this is exactly how I would've wanted this to have worked in C++".
I'll admit there's still a few things in Rust that C++ is more flexible (mainly the ability to have true variadic templates without having to rely on macros) but Rust prevents you from so much stupid stuff that you can easily get wrong in C++ if you're not extremely careful.
Huh. That tracks actually ya
C++ is unabated shit compared to C.
The secret is masochism. No, seriously, I love C++ and this is why
It's kinda neat to watch how many times the code can fail
Start with Java, then do C embedded. Then switch to python. Then need to do something high performance.
This is the way I learned to love C++
Still got mine, love that book.
Happy to hear. I eventually picked up PHP, Python, Perl and Javascript/Typescript instead. Did revisit C in later years and it's pretty fun when paired with an Arduino.
Love Perl :)
I was gonna learn PHP at various points over the past 30 years but everybody kept telling me there's no point because it'll be replaced soon.. still waiting.
Perl is amazing if you work with it full time and really learn it. But far to many ways to do things to just use pop into a collaborative project now and then.
PHP was hot shit in the 00s when I first learned it. Was pretty frowned upon in the 10s when I did Wordpress at work for a few years, but Laravel was pretty nice. Not going anywhere soon I bet.
It was "Programming Abstractions in C" for me...
And those books were fckn expensive… some still are. I’ve paid hundreds of dollars for only a few manuals that were impossible to find online for driver dev.
Yep, in ‘96 I had the entire Sun Java reference library on my shelf, and used it extensively.
Oldskool devs had books, we have Google. Both worked - one just needed a stronger bookshelf.
Oddly, I've been injured more times by falling computers than by falling books... Books don't have cables that snake across the floor and pull them down if trapped over
What do you mean? Java 8 has been out for a long time!
Java 8? The last book I bought was for Java 1.2...
Before google wasn't docs popular?
True! The old reference manuals were life savers, but they didn't update fast enough!
Yeah, the real question is what did we do before O’Reilly publishing?