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by cassandratt
1634 days ago
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I have a rule about ZERO copy-pasting from SO or anywhere else on the internet for that matter. If you don't understand the code, when you have all the time in the world to understand it, seek help, test it, and figure it out; you certain won't suddenly understand it better, when it breaks in production. Just because 100 idiots upvoted something, doesn't make it right. Personally, I avoid SO because I've seen too many wrong answers. I prefer documentation, or blogs explaining approaches. But, it can be a resource, especially to new developers, to help you understand how you need to think and how to approach problems. As a replacement for coding it yourself, it's might be hot garbage, so you should understand it before committing to having produced that code and assign your name to it. |
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I do too, in theory. In reality though, 90 percent of the time it's essentially unnavigable / unsearchable / basically intractable to use.
What you want is simply something that tells you "how do I do X" where X is some real-world thing, like strip the end-of-line characters from a file. What you get from "documentation" as such is a huge sprawl of text explaining the guys of 90 different command line options. Good luck digging your way through that.
Imperfect though it is, SO was created to address precisely this huge, gaping disparity between what users want, and what most "documentation" actually delivers. Did I mention it's imperfect? And that you actually have to (shudder) think about the examples given, before randomly cut-and-pasting them into production?
The whole point is though, that it's better than nothing, and frequently is mostly correct (and it's not that hard to tell when the answer is wrong or requires a bit of fine-tuning for your use case). And at the end of the day, still saves me hundreds of hours compared to the nearly useless "documentation" that ships with most running languages and platforms these days.