Comment by WillAdams
15 days ago
Be sure to check out her stories on Folkore.org:
https://www.folklore.org/0-index.html?author=Caroline+Rose
and esp.:
15 days ago
Be sure to check out her stories on Folkore.org:
https://www.folklore.org/0-index.html?author=Caroline+Rose
and esp.:
> Pretty soon, I figured out that if Caroline had trouble understanding something, it probably meant that the design was flawed. On a number of occasions, I told her to come back tomorrow after she asked a penetrating question, and revised the API to fix the flaw that she had pointed out. I began to imagine her questions when I was coding something new, which made me work harder to get things clearer before I went over them with her.
This alone is enough to justify hiring great technical writers (and technical writers with programming experience.)
Ah, remembering the phone-book Inside Mac volumes! Those were the days.
(Kids these days with StackExchange and Copilot have no idea.... now get off my lawn!)
It got better when tools like ObiWan came out to do basic lookups from your computer, along the lines of "what book and page is this function documented on?".
("But couldn't you just jump to the definition in your IDE?" Oh, you sweet summer child. First of all, most IDEs didn't have that functionality. Second, the header files didn't contain documentation. If you were lucky, they might have the argument names.)