Comment by tnoerlcnt34
8 years ago
Sure, but what usually happens is you sit down at a Unix command line for the first time and have no idea what to do. You ask someone (after seeing that `help` does nothing useful), and they tell you "use 'man' instead of 'help'". And you have no idea why, but you try it and it kind of helps and is better than nothing. You don't have any idea you should `read one of the many "Getting Started" or "Quick Guide" or "Beginning XXX" books.` (Likewise, you wouldn't know at first to install something like this, either.)
I think this is how it used to be, but now people just Google their problems, and typically they get Stack Overflow as a result.
Earlier this year, they announced that they have helped over one million developers to exit vim, for example. https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/05/23/stack-overflow-helping...
In my experience, the top-rated SO answer is typically better than the man page, because it answers the specific question I have, rather than listing all of the options in alphabetical order, forcing me to search the page itself for the information I really wanted.
... or Wikipedia.
Interestingly, Stack Exchange answers are sometimes constructed by people using search engines to find phrase matches, sometimes with ridiculous results. (-:
* https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/94238/who-or-what-...
That Stack Overflow web log entry is poorly researched, by the way. As I can attest from my own WWW site's statistics, there are reasons that a WWW site can have Ukraine at the top that have nothing to do with real people viewing relevant WWW pages, so conclusions such as
> It looks like developers in Ukraine, Turkey and Indonesia are getting stuck in Vim quite a bit:
are complete rubbish. One has to account for WWW browsers that pre-load pages, and WWW sites that feed stuff scraped from the likes of Wikipedia, Stack Exchange, my WWW site, and lots of others to WWW spiders: something that seems, from my statistics for this month so far, to be very popular for banking and pharmaceutical scam WWW sites in the Ukraine and the Russian Federation.
Here is how to exit emacs, by the way:
* http://jdebp.eu./Humour/exiting-emacs.html
Off-topic:
What do you hope to achieve by expressing domain names with a dot at the end? That's only required in zonefiles. No one else does that in hyperlinks and I wish you would stop doing it. It's annoying because your alternative notation is so rare that browsers don't normalise the equivalency, and now I have multiple divergent entries in the browser history.
I think I remember reading that a goal of StackOverflow was to essentially build comprehensive documentation of software in a question-answer format. That’s a neat idea. Most mature software has decent documentation in the form of a textbook or a technical manual, but it’s great to have everything documented in the form of “here’s an answer to every question you might have about this software.”