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by brabel 525 days ago
I think the person you're responding to must know all of this. This is stuff that's obvious to anyone who has ever written any code that required using libraries. Unfortunately , people like to pretend to have a gripe with something on the internet just for the sake of arguing. This is the only conclusion I can arrive at when people appear to seriously propose reading a header file in a text editor is somehow better than reading documentation in a purposefully designed documentation format. It's like saying browsers are just a waste of time when you can just use Gopher for everything.
2 comments
hyperold 524 days ago
Or it just might be that different people prefer different things. I'm a hardcore fan of header files too. Vim is my preferred way of dealing with text and I can do all kinds of magic with it with the speed of though and I prefer to use as plain as possible text files. In the rare occasion when the documentation needs more than ascii stuff it's best practice to write a nice tex and friends documentation plus a real tutorial anyway. And full literate programming style is hard to beat when you are dealing with complex things.
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almostdeadguy 524 days ago
It's fine to have preferences or cognitive inertia towards working a certain way. It's silly to pretend that doing things this way conveys some kind of universalist advantage or to conjure up a bunch of imaginary/highly niche scenarios (I'm remote coding over 28.8k at the bottom of the ocean and have no access to a browser anywhere!) that necessitate working this way for argumentative purposes.
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marcosdumay 524 days ago
The OP uses C libraries, and this is used to much simpler interfaces and much smaller dependency sets than the GP. So no, I don't think they know all of this.

But also, they probably to know how to keep their dependencies sane, and possibly think the best way to document that giant 2k lines interface is in a book. What are both really good opinions, that will never be really "understood" by communities the GP takes his libraries from just because it's not viable for them to do it.

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