Comment by zxcvcxz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zxcvcxz | Hacker News Reader

>forget your LAMP instincts to desperately search Google and StackExchange for every parameter: man pages are your new best friend.

The amount of arrogance here is astounding. For one thing it's a trope that Linux doesn't have good documentation, RHEL has better docs than anything I've seen from BSD. C is a whole software language and AFAIK you can't just "man c" and even if you could why would you want to read the whole manual/handbook for the C programming language to figure out something trivial? You would google it anyway.

The only reason using man pages on BSD might be better than google is because 90% of the answers you'll find on google will be from a Linux perspective and you'll have to do a second search to figure out how to apply the answer to BSD. Yes, 90% of the time the Linux solution will work on BSD but the 10% of the time when it doesn't is a huge pain.

That was my first thought too, but there actually might be something to it.

The thing about man pages is that they require effort and force you to develop deeper understanding about the tools you use. From that perspective, it can actually be helpful to apps quality. I genuinely think that most of web developers now (myself included) got used to solving problems by quick and dirty means. Our whole development process seems to be based on piling technical debt until we can't figure out what's going on.

I'm not actively encouraging using this stack for development, but as a wake up call it's not without merit.

you don't "man c", you man the function. like "man getaddrinfo". You know, because your OS is written in C and the way it works should be documented?

Typically, "arrogance" and any invocation of the phrase "man pages" go hand-in-hand, much like coffee and mints.

>The amount of arrogance here is astounding. For one thing it's a trope that Linux doesn't have good documentation, RHEL has better docs than anything I've seen from BSD

I think you'll have to accept that many people simply don't agree with your opinion here.

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