Are tutorials like this even relevant nowadays with LLMs? I think articles of the future should be purely about approach, strategy and pitfalls, not "type in command x" handholding.
How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me
121–130 of 455 posts
Re: How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me
#122I guess many tutorials are not made for absolute beginners and they have assumed you have learnt the basics before jumping into their topic. For example, if you never learn programming and set up an ide before, it has no way you can learn OpenGL as your first tutorial, and all the syntax and commands will look alienated.
And you can't write every document with an assumption that the reader knows nothing. Each document would end up the size of a phone book if you explained every single piece of technology used and provided tutorials for them.
Knowing where to jump in your stack is a tricky question, though.
Re: How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Beginners have to be nurtured through lots of context that builds up slowly. My son is 17 and very interested in programming. Had to explain to him public, private, internal, and also static the other night. I then joked, you should ask your teacher about recursion tomorrow. He's with his mom this weekend, but I'm anxiously awaiting hearing how that went.
I think Java is dying. If you want to teach algorithmic thinking , teach Python. If you want to teach hardware and low-level systems , teach C.
I concur with most of your thoughts, except that Java is never going away. I might wish that it would, but here we are.
Re: How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me
#124Are tutorials like this even relevant nowadays with LLMs? I think articles of the future should be purely about approach, strategy and pitfalls, not "type in command x" handholding.
How do you think the LLMs train?
If I release a new library tomorrow, do I not need to write docs for it?
Re: How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me
#125Can't recommend this approach highly enough: have someone with minimal expertise go through your docs with the goal of achieving the goal of the docs. Sit next to them or screenshare. Do not speak to them, certainly do not help, just watch. Watch them fumble. Watch them not know what to do. Watch them experience things you (the author) didn't, because you already had xyz configured on your machine and you forgot user…
I worked with someone who was great with this. They’d go through the docs and do exactly what was said, document where problems were hit and then repeat from scratch again and again. Seemed slow but their docs were excellent and I’m sure it saved more time having him hit each thing once than everyone else hitting them loads.
Funny enough, we had a hell of a time running a helpdesk where we designed the docs -- many of which I wrote myself -- to be executed exactly as written.
Guess what humans hate to do? Especially the smart ones, which of course you want to employ on your helpdesk? They just would not read the damned instructions.
I think this was because many of the instructions were dumb. We were explaining decades-old bank stuff. It didn't make sense, but it's what you had to do! So these guys tried to 'fix' it, and in doing so, broke it.
The whole support model was predicated on this idea that the 3rd level guys would write stuff that the 1st level guys would slavishly follow. It never worked.
Re: How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me
#126This is how I, a web developer, feel whenever I'm required to build something using cmake. I guess I need to go read a book about it or something because the instructions seem different every time.
I've been coding in C++ since the 90s, that's also how I feel whenever I'm required to build something using cmake.
Which is funny, because it's probably the easiest to use (common) build system around.
Re: How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
HPC? Windows NT? GCC? Video games? I'm a veteran C programmer with a deep dislike of C++, but to say it's not used for valuable software is just wrong.
The language committee only makes it harder and more astronauty every year. How many Unreal Engine developers from 2007-2013 understand CPP20/23?
Reminds me of the (now decades old) humorous observation that the entired R5RS (Scheme) book is shorter than the table of contents of the C++ spec.
Re: How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me
#128That was a good bit of humor.
Also there are some popular ways of explaining things that don't do the job (your experience is maybe different). For example: try to learn very basics of object oriented programming. The tutorial will inevitably have examples like "Class Bicycle" or "Class Car". These are out of programming context and never helped me to understand how to benefit from OOP in programming.
Another example is git tutorials. Having used git for years it feels so simple. In the very beginning it wasn't and those maps with circles and arrows didn't help.
Re: How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me
#129Can't recommend this approach highly enough: have someone with minimal expertise go through your docs with the goal of achieving the goal of the docs. Sit next to them or screenshare. Do not speak to them, certainly do not help, just watch. Watch them fumble. Watch them not know what to do. Watch them experience things you (the author) didn't, because you already had xyz configured on your machine and you forgot user…
I was talking to a friend who is a beta-tester for crochet patterns, the business owner sends out a pattern to a trusted group and the get feedback on the descriptions and the work and any things that would make it easier before they put it up for sale.
I do think a lot of developer tutorials and documentation don't take into consideration that many people might not have a common understanding of terminology especially if the reader is coming across this problem or process for the first time.
Re: How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me
#130Are tutorials like this even relevant nowadays with LLMs? I think articles of the future should be purely about approach, strategy and pitfalls, not "type in command x" handholding.
I am not sure if you thought through the implications of your proposal. LLMs are trained on examples in the training material. If something is new and isn't accessible because it lacks tangible examples the adoption rate will be lower, so there will be less training material and therefore LLMs will not be of use here.
In fact, that entire aspect of LLMs is something that is not talked about as often. But is worth a whole discussion in itself. If I remember correctly, the availability of training material for a technology already has slightly impacted more niche corners of the tech world.