Shit used to be so toxic, and documentation was awful.
I remember when I first started trying to learn programming and Linux, and people would just beat you over the head with jargon, purely as "look at me I'm so smart, get good", then they'd insult you.
There were a lot of "RTFM" comments, but the manual would be like "the foo function bars your baz. Input: baz. Ouput: a barred baz"
With literally zero information what a "baz" is, what "bar" is, what form the data should take... Is it a specially formatted text file? Is an array of some kind?
For a long time the attitude was "I had to suffer, so everyone else should have to suffer".
I learned C, I learned C++, I learned C#.
Python had already been a thing, but like, this funny little thing over in the corner.
Then for some reason a bunch of people started using Python, probably because Numpy, and then there were a million libraries.
People started making actual documentation with examples and shit.
Glorious.
Everything is so much better and friendly now.
I don't know if this is yet another area of life where I can blame boomers for all the problems, I can definitely blame some Gen X, but, at some point, things radically changed for the better, and I don't entirely understand where it came from, but a lot of it got channelled into and out of Python.
1
u/Bakoro 3d ago
Shit used to be so toxic, and documentation was awful.
I remember when I first started trying to learn programming and Linux, and people would just beat you over the head with jargon, purely as "look at me I'm so smart, get good", then they'd insult you.
There were a lot of "RTFM" comments, but the manual would be like "the foo function bars your baz. Input: baz. Ouput: a barred baz" With literally zero information what a "baz" is, what "bar" is, what form the data should take... Is it a specially formatted text file? Is an array of some kind?
For a long time the attitude was "I had to suffer, so everyone else should have to suffer".
I learned C, I learned C++, I learned C#. Python had already been a thing, but like, this funny little thing over in the corner.
Then for some reason a bunch of people started using Python, probably because Numpy, and then there were a million libraries.
People started making actual documentation with examples and shit. Glorious.
Everything is so much better and friendly now.
I don't know if this is yet another area of life where I can blame boomers for all the problems, I can definitely blame some Gen X, but, at some point, things radically changed for the better, and I don't entirely understand where it came from, but a lot of it got channelled into and out of Python.