[saurik]

This seems orthogonal to the complaint: the person you are responding to is assuming you aren't just doing this because you think it is a worthy art form for your audience of people who enjoy it, but that you are attempting to write something that provides strong value to the reader. You are welcome to write whatever you want, but you are fooling yourself if you think it is helping. If you want a music analogy, you are welcome to make a movie score that has loud and clear lyrics while actors are talking... but I would still say to you that lyrics "have no place" in a movie score during a dialog scene--the audience is trying (and now failing) to hear the dialogue--even if there are some people who seem to enjoy that. So: you are welcome to write those tutorials in that style if you personally must--no one is saying they should be banned and censored and deleted from the web--and also you really should know that you are actively making a decision to be less useful.

[braythwayt]

"Useful" is very much context-dependent. A post that does not catch the reader's attention is not useful. If you write in a style that is indistinguishable from a thousand other authors writing about the same topic, your writing is equally useless.

It is a mistake to think that an "audience" is one uniform set of people with identical needs, tastes, and interests. And therefore it is a mistake to suggest that there is something inherently "less useful" about one style of writing over another.

Less useful for whom? Under what circumstances?

I agree 100% that if you define your audience as "person trying to solve a problem and googling for help," my writing is terribly useless.

But I don't write for that person under those circumstances, and I assure you that the pictures in my blog posts do not bleed over to obscure any of the text.

I personally think that analogy doesn't really fit. A different take might be to consider Raymond Smullyan writing about combinatory logic.

If you just want to solve a homework problem, reading "To Mock a Mockingbird" is going to be an exercise in frustration. What's all this faffing about with birds and forests? Or locks and vaults?

Nevertheless, a great many people have found the book both useful and entertaining, which is a kind of useful in its own right. Smullyan also knew that there were other ways to write, and he wrote textbooks that eschewed the metaphors and entertainment while focusing on the utility.

---

I am not fooling myself that my writing is helping some people, some of the time. I know that it does, and I have the data to prove it. But, I am also not fooling myself that what I write is the best thing for all people under all circumstances.

I regularly endorse buying books like Eloquent JavaScript or You Don't Know JavaScript precisely because they are written in a manner that is useful in a different way than my own writing is useful.

But getting back to the subject of the post... I think that ultimately, search should be sure to highlight StackOverflow and MDN results or similar. Reference works designed to answer questions simply and directly are what you need when you're in the middle of a problem.

Blog posts serve a different purpose, such as motivating you to want to solve the problem in the first place.