[milesrout]

I've read several posts here where people say things like "this is badly designed becausw it assumes people read the documentation".

???????

Yes you need to read the docs. That is programming 101. If you have vim set up properly then you can open the man page for the identifier under your cursor in a single keypress. There is ZERO excuse not to read the manual. There is no excuse not to check error messages. etc.

Yet we consistently see people that want everything babyproofed.

[Juliate]

_When_ there is a manual.

On the other hand, there's no excuse for designers & developers (or their product manager, if that's the one in authority) not to work their ass off on the ergonomics/affordance of the tools they release to any public (be it end users or developers, which are the end users of the tool makers, etc.).

It benefits literally everyone: the users, the product reputation & value, the builders reputation, the support team, etc.

[GoblinSlayer]

Implying documentation exists. You're supposed to read the code, not man pages.

[AnimalMuppet]

Yes, you need to read the docs. Yes.

And yet...

Do people read the docs? Often, no, they don't. So, are you creating tools for the people we have, or for the people you think we should have? If the latter, you are likely to find that your tool makes less impact than you think it should.

Computer languages are not tools for illiterates. You need to learn what you're doing. And yet, programmers do so less than we think they should. If we don't license programmers (to weed out the under-trained), then we're going to have to deal with languages being used by people who didn't read the docs. We should give at least some thought to having them degrade gracefully in that situation.