[catwind7]

so what if it is?

i know what the bike shedding metaphor is and frankly you're stretching it a bit because all this person is trying to do is educate and they're not even saying this is the only way to do it.

seems odd to pull out the bike shed metaphor for every case there's an abundance of technical articles on a subject matter. There's lots of tutorials on for loops in X language. Do you consider that bike shedding?

[kerkeslager]

I'm not gonna argue with you over whether the metaphor I used was applicable or not--the point of the metaphor was to communicate and it's clear I succeeded in communicating. It's clear you understood what I meant, because you provided another example. Yes, whether or not you agree the bike shedding metaphor applies, you have to agree that having the 100th tutorial on how to do something that's in the docs that ships with the language is equally pointless.

[catwind7]

i think you succeeded in communicating your thoughts and feelings in spite of the metaphor.

there are plenty of documentation in the form of tutorials on for nearly every aspect of every programming language I can think of. I think it's important to keep in mind that we all learn differently and sometimes one explanation can make no sense while another makes a lot of sense.

That said, I think I get your frustration in that sometimes the process of _finding_ the explanation that clicks for whatever your question is (how to emit assembler?) can be really painful because all the explanations are shallow.

However, I don't think it's fair to take that frustration out on the writers (I got the impression you were, but maybe you weren't and just felt like venting). I for one encourage engineers to write if no for no other reason than to better cement their own understanding.

I do wonder, though, if maybe there's some improvements we can make to how we filter / search for long-form technical articles outside of google so that the content is more relevant

[kerkeslager]

> That said, I think I get your frustration in that sometimes the process of _finding_ the explanation that clicks for whatever your question is (how to emit assembler?) can be really painful because all the explanations are shallow.

While I agree with your overall point about different learning styles, that's not really the problem I'm describing. Introductory material on emitting assembly or similar, doesn't exist for any learning style as far as I know. The best that I know of are some dead-tree books, and their emitters target dead or obscure architectures. None of the code examples are ones I could run on my machine.

> However, I don't think it's fair to take that frustration out on the writers (I got the impression you were, but maybe you weren't and just felt like venting).

That's a fair criticism: I apologized to the writer in a different post.