Gregory's Server@mhoye Are the original man pages actually bad? One of the distinguishing characteristics I've noticed of everyone who worked at Bell Labs or sort of inherits that lineage (the Go team for example) is their unusually high standard of writing…
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@mhoye My impression from reading about the history of unix is that the `man` pages were considered pretty good for learning things, even after unix was widely distributed. Then again, “I learned all of unix by reading man pages, why can't you?” is also a classic stereotype of unsufferable unix elitism. |
@zellyn I don't think the ideas of "good" or "bad" are meaningfully translated to our present day needs from that historical context. How good does documentation need to be when the person who wrote the tool is two desks over and happy to ask questions? In that context, "Here are the basics, the code is in ~/src/ and if you have questions talk to me at lunch" is probably sufficient.