Comment by yepthatsreality | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yepthatsreality | Hacker News Reader

yepthatsreality

This is only true really for younger developers who haven’t understood the value of RTFM for software. Web search is less valuable to me as I get older due to experience. It is more valuable to those that don’t have experience and want a playground to say: “if I do this, how can I do it, who else has done it?”

A good example is if I ask a developer to write a MITM proxy server. You can search all day how to write one and you’ll find a few projects on Github. However not a lot of info on the whys and whats. This is because no one wants the responsibility of their work being used in an attack. To get all the whys and whats you need to read documentation for the protocols and language you’re using. Otherwise you will end up with a pretty hack-y solution.

Because there is no stackoverflow on this, a younger developer would spend the greater part of 3 months understanding something simpler than it appears to be.

Search hasn’t made me a better developer so it’s importance is minimal. Best practices have made me a better developer. Searching for solutions is not a best practice.

I'm an older developer and I google constantly. I deal with Java, Typescript, Scala, Ruby, Python, and bash on a regular basis and sometimes I forget the syntax or method for an operation. I can usually find it within seconds.

I see older developers do it too.

And which sites do you find this information on. Is it in the documentation? Wouldn’t it be quicker to just know what docs will tell you that info each time instead of searching for “Java function signature” or “JS pass-by-value” and going to the same place. You’re welcome to continuously search for stuff if that workflow is useful to you, but it’s not very efficient.

How do you find the docs? Do you just keep a giant list of bookmarks for every project and sdk you might use? Or, do you Google the docs?

Yes I keep bookmarks or often document the links in my brief of the project. Or I've used the links so much I know the site path to get to a doc.

You're trying to find a hole in my logic, but you're ignoring what I'm saying:

Searching the web isn't an important skill, just as going to the library to research isn't an important skill. The skill is reading, research, and organizing research itself. Google just makes it easy to be lazy about research and gives you the impression that with a few keywords, the research is organized for you.

You're right that the real skill is not googling, but it seems like you're doing the same thing as everyone else. You don't have all the syntax and functions memorized, so you have to look things up occasionally, ya? You just skip Google and go straight to the docs. Googling is so quick though, any efficiency lost over clicking a few links seems minimal and not worth arguing about.

> You're trying to find a hole in my logic, but you're ignoring what I'm saying

I think you're ignoring what everyone else is saying and that is that Googling is not about Googling, it's just a tool for researching. It's not all about Googling some random blog post about how to manage cache invalidation, it's shorthand of knowing how to use search engines to get you to the right page, documentation, scholarly article or yes, random blog, about cache invalidation.

...that’s what I’m saying.

But even after it was explicitly spelled out to you, you still don't get that it's what everyone else was saying too?

Yeah, sure that’s what happened.

DDG might has a helpful !bang[0] available or zeal[1] (or dash[2] for macOS) can also be of help

[0]: https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=

[1]: https://zealdocs.org/

[2]: https://kapeli.com/dash

Honestly, the documentation builtin search engine is usually way worse than google's. If I type something like "python 3.4 queue docs" I'm at the right docs page for that exact module and version in seconds.

I have hotkeys and chrome/firefox extensions to make it very fast to start and navigate a Google search. I don't have to remember all the different docs; I can use the same key-based workflow for all my searches.

Over time I've gotten a feel for what sites have better answers for different questions. E.g. StackOverflow is great for explicit syntax questions because the answer is targeted to the question, unlike documentation which is trying to explain the whole syntax.

Disagree completely. So much documentation is written poorly and will lead to confused implementations.

Sure, but poorly written documentation isn’t what I’m talking about. For every bit of poorly written documentation there’s probably already a tool with great documentation that’s been doing it better for much longer than whatever you may be working on.

Returning to my MITM proxy example, there is a python tool already called `mitmproxy`. A search will tell you that but the site will tell you how to use it. A quick search on how to use it will bring up too many resources with the actual documentation not really ranked as the top result. Even though it should be, it could reinforce stackoverflowing everything. Constantly using dated secondhand advice is not ideal in my opinion.

Your point is wrong if poor documentation exists.

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