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>In those days, we would usually read the manual when we needed to dig past a surface-level understanding of how things work. The manuals are dry and dense, but they're much easier to read with modern niceties like "Ctrl+F".

Then, after that didn't work, we had to go to find the weird bearded guy that didn't like to talk to people, but knew everything. He would usually tell you the answer, but in a condescending way that made you understand that you only came to him in "emergencies" and that you were kind of stupid for asking an "obvious" question. Actually, now that I think of it, that is stackoverflow now!

Thank god message boards started taking off! ... but sadly, then the "real" Internet came and killed it. :-(

Before the real internet came and killed the forums, the weird bearded guy would lurk on the forums. He's the guy who makes you answer general questions like,

"Why would you want to do that?"

"What's this for?"

"Did you try searching before asking such a stupid question?"

Those are the same questions that people ask on SO, although the respondents aren't exclusively men with beards.

OP bemoaned how people on StackOverflow would tell you not to do what you're asking about. Reference material is not the cause of that "weird bearded guy" problem, but it is one possible solution.

We're talking about software developers, not wizards. It's not like you have to offer a dram of blood and draw a pentagram with salt before you approach the ancient grimoires.

>We're talking about software developers, not wizards. It's not like you have to offer a dram of blood and draw a pentagram with salt before you approach the ancient grimoires.

Back then, it seemed a lot like that!

> Those are the same questions that people ask on SO

On the good threads that become helpful, yeah.

On most of it, no, those are not the questions people ask there. They will focus on unrelated marginal issues, try to refuse to answer the question, just assume the reason the person is doing it (even when explicitly told on the question), and just throw wrong answers on the wall to see if they stick. (Granted, throwing things on the wall is a useful way to answer some questions, but not all.)

It's good that Google rewards the first kind of thread, but the second one is what sends people away from the platform.

I've seen SO answerers who don't know the answer to a question try to force it into an "X-Y problem" and steer it until the question turned into something they could answer.

Q: "I'm trying to configure Foo to produce Bar, but it's giving me this error!"

A1: "What are you really trying to do?" [Unsaid: I don't know how to produce Bar either]

A2: "You should not be trying to produce Bar. Instead you should produce Baz. I know how to do that--follow the following steps..."

A3: "Producing Bar will not solve what I imagine your goal is. In the general case, you may need to produce many different results, which I would rather answer about..."

Q: "Uhh, thanks everyone, but I'm just trying to configure Foo to produce Bar."

My favorite is when they do that, then take the incorrect made-up answer to a question that was not asked to close the question due to: Duplicate of..., Off-topic because..., Needs details or clarity, Needs more focus and Opinion-based ...

Many such cases!

ha! I see this in the dev/qa dynamic all the time. It also happens between product to dev/qa as well.

There is so much imposter syndrome and insecurity behind those type of answers. I wish we all had better filters online when our fragile egos go into defensive mode.

The Q&A format of Stack Overflow isn't really built for complex questions. It works really well for being an easily searched repository of short, technical solutions to well-bounded technical problems.

The Elixir community talked about this a lot on the forums back when I was active on there, because language rankings look at Stack Overflow questions and Stack Overflow questions proliferate in languages with footguns. "Don't use obviously_named_function(), use obscr_wrd_fcn() instead" fits the SO formula quite well. Well designed languages, Elixir included, don't produce many of those kinds of question/answers. That leaves significantly more room for discourse around architecture and other higher-level conceptual stuff, which doesn't really have one correct answer, and thus is ill-suited for SO, being relegated to the lower-discoverability forums (and worse, the un-discoverable Discord).

Even if they aren’t literally weird old men with beards who want to make you feel bad for bothering them, you know deep inside there lurks one. (Jk - also, have been the cranky one, even if I didn’t have a beard at the time).

lol, this was the pre-Internet problem. It usually went like this...

>"Why would you want to do that?" because it seems like the right thing to do? Is there a better way.

>"What's this for?" the boss wants it

>"Did you try searching before asking such a stupid question?" I read the manual and thought about it a lot (remember this was pre-Internet)

so, there was a lot of "rough" hand-holding to learn the ropes for edge cases.

Documentation now is no where near the quality of older stuff. The GW BASIC manual is awesome. The manual for WordStar, PC-DOS, COBOL-80, and so on... these were marvelous.

The thing is... languages were smaller because they hadn't started the accretion of thousands of libraries and frameworks.

In my experience, every language out there is somewhat easy to learn and master. The ecosystem around it is an insane and ever-growing Katamri Damacy of (largely) crap. We all must know it, must use it, and must contribute to it because no one trusts the work of the individual and only the work of an aggregate of individuals... people often don't even trust their own code.

> Documentation now is no where near the quality of older stuff.

I wouldn't make a blanket statement either way, but there are certainly counterexamples to this:

- The mpv manual[1] is a work of art.

- The Arch Linux wiki[2] is a treasure trove of information for not just Arch-specific topics, but Linux in general.

- MDN[3] is the defacto standard for any web documentation.

- The PostgreSQL[4] documentation is quite thorough and high quality.

What I think explains your point are two things:

1. There's just a vast amount of software since those early days. "Software is eating the world", and it's realistically impossible for most of it to be well documented.

2. A lot of information is spread out and produced by users of the software; in books, on blogs, tutorials, forums, videos, etc. Sure, this might be seen as a failure of the software authors to produce good documentation, but many of these resources wouldn't exist if the web didn't make them accessible. In some ways this is better than having a single source of reference, as you can benefit from the collective wisdom of the hivemind, rather than only from what the author thought relevant to document.

[1]: https://mpv.io/manual/

[2]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/

[3]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/

[4]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/

Some software has good documentation nowadays. Back in the day, it was de riguer; no-one would dare to release something without a full manual, if only because they knew it was they who'd end up fielding user questions if they didn't.

a chatgpt program trained on just unix man pages would be interesting.