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by BirAdam
1277 days ago
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Documentation now is no where near the quality of older stuff. The GW BASIC manual is awesome. The manual for WordStar, PC-DOS, COBOL-80, and so on... these were marvelous. The thing is... languages were smaller because they hadn't started the accretion of thousands of libraries and frameworks. In my experience, every language out there is somewhat easy to learn and master. The ecosystem around it is an insane and ever-growing Katamri Damacy of (largely) crap. We all must know it, must use it, and must contribute to it because no one trusts the work of the individual and only the work of an aggregate of individuals... people often don't even trust their own code. |
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I wouldn't make a blanket statement either way, but there are certainly counterexamples to this:
- The mpv manual[1] is a work of art.
- The Arch Linux wiki[2] is a treasure trove of information for not just Arch-specific topics, but Linux in general.
- MDN[3] is the defacto standard for any web documentation.
- The PostgreSQL[4] documentation is quite thorough and high quality.
What I think explains your point are two things:
1. There's just a vast amount of software since those early days. "Software is eating the world", and it's realistically impossible for most of it to be well documented.
2. A lot of information is spread out and produced by users of the software; in books, on blogs, tutorials, forums, videos, etc. Sure, this might be seen as a failure of the software authors to produce good documentation, but many of these resources wouldn't exist if the web didn't make them accessible. In some ways this is better than having a single source of reference, as you can benefit from the collective wisdom of the hivemind, rather than only from what the author thought relevant to document.
[1]: https://mpv.io/manual/
[2]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/
[3]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/
[4]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/