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Comment by mrob | Hacker News Reader

I still vaguely remember how difficult man pages were to understand when I first started reading them. I'm pretty sure the biggest obstacle is the fact that most documentation is written for people who already know the standard computer science terminology. I have a generally negative opinion of LLMs, but one thing they do very well is function as a "reverse dictionary". You can input a idiosyncratic description of something you want and get the standard terminology. This is a new and valuable capability.

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There is a universe out there, where most of the world is reading Solaris man pages, instead of Linux man pages. Whatever your thoughts on the Solaris OS, I think it is fair to say that no operating system has ever matched the quality of its man pages.

Interestingly, I also converged on the "reverse dictionary" usage of LLMs, in around 2024[1], mostly to indulge in (human) language-learning.

An excerpt from the post below:

``` It is a phenomenal reverse dictionary (i.e. which English words mean "of a specific but unspecified character, quality, or degree"). It not only works for English, but also for Esperanto (i.e. which Esperanto words mean "of a specific but unspecified character, quality, or degree"), as well as my own obscure native language. This is a huge time-saver when learning languages (normal dictionaries won't cut it, and bi-lingual dictionaries are limited, if they are available at all). Even if you are just using a language you are fluent in, a reverse-dictionary-prompt can help you find words and usages, and can also help you find "dark spots" in the language's lexicon. ```

[1]: https://galacticbeyond.com/chat-room-dispatches-intelligence...

I've commented on this subject before, but the fact of the matter is that kids getting into high tech and programming mostly don't read books anymore. How do I know? Recently I was hanging out with a bunch of high school students who asked me how I learned. I said it was mostly via books and man pages. "Yeah, don't sleep on high quality written material. O'Reilly. Wiley. Addison-Wesley. Manning. MIT. No Starch Press. &c..."

Well. You should have seen the look on their faces. I might as well have morphed into the Steve Buscemi meme "How do you do, fellow kids?" They looked at me like I was a total relic or greybeard and said things like "Nah, nobody reads tech books anymore; I learned Typescript from YouTube videos."

That has been the case for a decade

I learned programming from tutorials :) Only after I kept encountering terms in tutorials (long after I was building (badly organized) programs) that I didn't understand well did I decide to read my first book, K&R's C. This was when animated gifs were a novelty not worth the data transfer time.

I think every generation feels like their way of learning was the best, but we all make it work. There was a time when the architects of systems directly tutored programmers on how to write programs.

Already in 2008, as a millennial teen without internet at home, I was learning C# and XNA without a single book, just tutorials and official docs I downloaded from the library alongside Visual Studio Express. I couldn't have afforded books on it anyway, but I can't imagine teens in 2026 using anything other than Youtube and some tutorials to learn this stuff.

> most documentation is written for people who already know the standard computer science terminology

Not really. It's probably complexity for the sake of it in some cases. Also it's frequently ambiguous, and I'm really not sure why: it looks like some developers lack the basic logic (?!).

This is the best use case of LLMs, the one I use it the most for.

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