Comment by reikonomusha
8 years ago
This wasn’t always true, when software was less replaceable and felt more valuable. Part of this cake from the fact that software distribution was more difficult. If you ever have purchased a compiler for example you might find yourself interested in everything you can learn about it from the manual.
Now developers are trigger-happy Googlers looking for the single salient example atop StackOverflow answers.
Or, more likely, somewhere in the entire operation of a computer there exists a task or two in which we don't care to specialize.
The browser is a much nicer environment for consuming manuals than the terminal.
True, unless you're actively working in the terminal, in which case it's kind of a pain to switch to, I'm gonna say.
Nonetheless, it was the reasoning that underpinned Daniel Bernstein's slashdoc idea from the turn of the century.
* https://cr.yp.to/slashdoc.html