> Man pages are notoriously a colossal waste of time. In general they are poorly thought out, they are incomplete, they were written with complete disregard for user experience, and more often than not they are way out of date.
Uh, what? What man pages are you reading? I read manpages all the time, and I've never run into an issue where one contained info that was untrue because outdated. The only manpages I've ever read that I'd characterize as incomplete are Apple's.¹
> Why do you think sites like Stack overflow is so popular? Because all those "incurious" people in tech feels the need to ask questions and dig through answers on how to solve problems?
One of the reasons Stack Overflow is so popular is that people who can't/won't read docs can use it to have answers spoonfed to them, often by people who only differ from them in being more willing/able to read the docs. Isn't that extremely obvious?
> unreadable documents
Reading isn't a singular skill— each genre requires its own skills, and you gradually pick those up by reading in that genre. Reading novels doesn't much prepare you to read math textbooks, but that doesn't make all math textbooks 'unreadable'.
The same things goes for skimming. Skimming a text is likewise a (set of) genre-specific skill(s), built up through practice.
Frankly, moving from your terminal to your web browser to look up how to use a CLI tool is only consistently faster than working with the docs native to that CLI environment (man pages, info pages, usage messages, --help flags, help subcommands, tldr pages, etc.) if you have don't have very good reading skills in the genres of those native docs.
As someone who does not have difficulty skimming or navigating manpages quickly, when someone tells me that digging through StackOverflow seems like less of a waste of time than reading docs and so they never read docs, I have to wonder if the real issue is that a reading skills deficit is caught in a self-reinforcing loop.
And indeed, a trip to StackOverflow never ends at StackOverflow for a person with much curiosity. Because even if a curious person finds a solution to their immediate problem, they will wonder things like:
- is this solution outmoded by some other fix?
- how is the feature/option/change used in this solution actually supposed to work?
- are there any alternatives I should know about?
- if I wanted to do things slightly differently, could I still use the method/feature/option referenced in this solution? does it have any parameters that are easy to swap or tweak?
- is this scenario what the feature/method/option in the solution is actually intended for? should I care?
... and the quickest way to answer questions like that is usually a glance at a manual.
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1: In some cases with GNU stuff the literal `man` pages are abridged versions of the `info` pages. But even then, the `man` pages direct you to `info` pages. It's not like they leave you having.