Hacker News Reader

Yes, but that attitude is not dead: how many projects have you come across where the only documentation is the JavaDoc or equivalent? It allows someone to tick the box that yes the documentation is done, with minimal effort, but it's not that useful to the next programmer, who really needs sample code, oh, I get this from that, and this from there, then I feed them both to the function...

JavaDoc can be good, there's nothing to stop you including short usage examples for a class. Not that it's that common...

You had man pages, which are as good if not better than what you might find on Google. If you were writing C programs on a UNIX system, everything you needed was there. No need for K&R to kill trees putting all that in their book.

I agree, although I still like having a hard copy reference. The biggest problem is that books are harder to keep current.

Yeah. You can't write "THIS PAGE IS ALL LIES" on a webpage, but it's easy and helpful in a book.