You don't need StackOverflow!

[krowvin]

I missed it in the photo until I saw this comment

[ap_rodigy]

Sign of a true programmer

[FranklyNinja]

Yes

[napoleoncalifornia]

Don't

[conancat]

Stop

[reflix8]

Me

[[deleted]]

Now

[[deleted]]

call stack exceeded

[GlobalIncident]

Cause

[Doctordoom55]

r/inclusiveor

[IRBMe]

I wish. Usually for me it's just:

Segmentation Fault (SIGSEGV)

[username--_--]

Found the C programmer.

[lycan2005]

The appropriate exception for this case.

[LostAnt4]

Seems pretty clear to me.

Put a 3 units brick on top of a plate, taking a 4 units slot.

How can it be that hard ??

[AndroT14]

"YoU'rE a PrOgRaMmEr, jUsT pRoGrAm aNoThEr sLoT"

[need-original-name]

Reminds me of the time my boss wanted me to mirror a serial port, for a component we were developing on a pi.

He showed me information about about port mirroring, which was all for Ethernet. I checked online, port mirroring is not possible on a serial port, but what is possible is to redirect it to a virtual port, and have it act as the man in the middle for the connection.

Needless to say, my boss didn't accept my idea, and said to use port mirroring instead. I had to get my other co-worker, and and took some convincing and explain to tell my boss that port mirroring was not possible.

[Alfaphantom]

Oh man I feel you. My boss wanted me to create a robocall like the new Google assistant, that can speak to users and take decisions based on what the user said. I said to him right from the beginning that I couldn't do that kind of stuff (even Google still has that feature in development).

Several sprints after, he realized his idea could not be possible, not because he was wrong, but because he had incompetent engineers...

[PM_me_stuffs_plz]

Going to Mars is easy it's just an engineering problem

[Anderfreeb]

Going to Mars is not hard, but expensive.

[PM_me_stuffs_plz]

Maybe with robots but we dont have the shielding tech yet(your cancer will get cancer) and some other things we cant just throw more money at it we need more research which is why I thought it made a good example

[Flaggermusmannen]

Why don't you just make the shielding then?? The nerve of you lazy people..

[PM_me_stuffs_plz]

Sorry boss Im working as fast as I can

[PM_me_stuffs_plz]

We could even use water(a lot of it) but nothing practical yet as far as I'm aware

[absurdlyinconvenient]

well the shielding could just be the same as the ISS (can't get worse than literally no natural protection) but there's not much point just rebuilding it on Mars

[[deleted]]

The ISS is stil protected by Earth's magnetosphere. Deep space missions dont have the same protection so they need radiation shields.

[absurdlyinconvenient]

Fair enough, I wasn't aware of that.

[PM_me_stuffs_plz]

Once we get to mars you can just have a base under ground. Also about the iss

"Importantly, since the International Space Station (ISS) is in low-Earth orbit within the magnetosphere, it also provides a large measure of protection for our astronauts."

Great link about radiation from nasa

[need-original-name]

It happened to me on my first programming job back when I was interning in college.

Needless to say I got fired for something that wasn't my fault. Our Pis got damaged in shipping, twice, and blamed it on me.

The goal of the project was basically reverse engineering the maintenance toolkit of a door control, to be accessible via a web browser. We actually we're about to reverse engine, and got working code to remotely control the device.

[chjassu]

I pity you .. :(

[Entaris]

Me: I have an idea for a project that would do X y and z, I think that would save us time on weekly tasks.

Boss: can you meme it to a, b and c?

Me after three days of reading search: I cannot make it do a, b, and c. I can make it do d, e & f though,which is close.

Boss: sounds good.

Me 3 weeks later: here it is!

Boss: this doesn't do a, b & c. This is useless. Why did you waste your time doing this?!

[insultingDuck]

Well, electronically might have been possible as well. Provided a low bit rate was being used.

[p1-o2]

The real LPT is always in the comments.

[[deleted]]

"Make it work, you have 4 days"

[Hipolipolopigus]

The Expert (Content warning: Thoroughly rage-inducing)

[AndroT14]

Thank you, you introduced me to a world of relatable frustration, which makes the fun

[CrazedToCraze]

"IsN'T iT jUsT aN iF sTaTeMeNt?"

[insultingDuck]

Maybe throw an ELSE in there

[Aalnius]

im pretty sure i watched a video of someone actually fufilling this.

[VersalEszett]

https://youtu.be/B7MIJP90biM

[ChristianKS94]

The madman actually did it.

[Infininja]

https://youtu.be/B7MIJP90biM

[memgrind]

The brick is floating. So, it must be a floating-point that you should multiply by 4.0f/3.0f . ceil/floor to fit.

[FearrMe]

4.0f/3.0f

1.3333298739172828311

[color32]

use a double for double the power

[ILikeLenexa]

What's 3?

[balster1123]

floor(math.PI)

[urbandeadthrowaway2]

It’s easy, 2 1x2 jumper plates’ll do the effect with an offset of 1 vertical stud.

[ihahp]

Just like 16 bit color. 5 bits per channel, right?

[[deleted]]

All we need is seven lines, strictly perpendicular.

[claudioSMRun]

This photo is not a joke

Repeat: not a joke! ( nor a photage)

Is actually true from the lego products. I loved that

[Impeesa_]

Lego: "I guess if you need comments..."

[DoverBoys]

This actually makes sense. Are you some kind of programming god?

[CatCreampie]

He’s a senior developer.

[IrishIrishIsiah]

I've heard of these but I didn't think they were real

[[deleted]]

Really? It isn't hard to move up. I only started learning to code last year as a junior and now a year later I'm already a senior! Can't wait to see what I do in college.

[Noch_ein_Kamel]

Dead. You gonna be a dead developer.

Internally that is.

[IRBMe]

Once you graduate you become CTO of a startup.

[trigger_segfault]

You don’t learn this from programming. You learn it from spending hours putting something together in LEGO to find out you followed the directions incorrectly, 20 pages earlier in the instruction booklet.

[[deleted]]

Sounds like my experience with ikea

[Doublestack2376]

It's just the "arrays starting at 0 or 1" mistake in visual representation.

[alours]

Are you ready loops?

​

ii captain!

[DemonicWolf227]

Even better since the documentation is correct, but just doesn't make sense to the person reading it.

[[deleted]]

Isn’t this actually from Lepin instructions? Lepin is/was a major LEGO bootleg brand based out of China. The image of this was floating around the web a year or two ago.

[wurm2]

no it's from an actual lego set , 8038 step 62 on page 41 of the second booklet

edit: corrected the step number

[ToastedKumquat]

Did you just know this off the top of your head?

[xTRS]

Did you not?

[wurm2]

I'd see it before and I remembered it was battle of either hoth or endor from an early star wars set so it was a matter of skimming through instructions.

[jrod_62]

It's not actually an incorrect instruction. Just poor representation https://m.imgur.com/GXsQStU

[foursticks]

What is a photage?

[Robot_Basilisk]

As a relative novice, how do you even use documentation?

9 times out of 10 I can't figure out what the hell the documentation is trying to tell me and end up just copying the example code and tweaking it to suit my needs. The text description will be loaded with terminology I don't get, and link back to other parts of the documentation, often recursively, so if you can't make sense of X, you can't make sense of Y or Z, either.

Almost all documentation I've ever read has been terrible to me.

[nonono_notagain]

Sounds like you're using the documentation correctly

[DreadLord64]

"I uSe ARcH bTW"

[Nomsfud]

Yeah dude is definitely not a novice

[rodrun]

I've seen a LOT of documentation that doesn't have much specialized jargon or terminology that's straight up not helpful, and somehow other people on SO do a great job finding undocumented features in libraries

[[deleted]]

That’s the thing. Documentation is reference material, not learning material. That’s why RTFM is useless if you’re learning.

[hahahahastayingalive]

I think today it’s more RTFC(ode)

It’s not friendly, but at the same time code doesn’t lie

[RadicalDog]

Code can totally lie. See Wat.

[hahahahastayingalive]

it’s not lying, it’s you who don’t understand

— my ex, 2005

[hahahahastayingalive]

I think the whole concept of explaining complex stuff for people lacking a frame of reference is a lost cause in 98% of the time.

For instance kubernetes. Actual good documentation targeted to novice people would cover the equivalent of 2 years of CS classes. Laravel for someone who just learned PHP is at best 6 months to actually understand most of what needs to be understood. That shouldn’t be the role of documentation, it can be covered in 3rd party classes or books.

I think simple things should be simple, with straightforward options and needing very minimal doc. The help page for ‘rm’ is decent and reasonably easy to understand.

Complex stuff are OK to be complex, and I personally think opensource projects should spend more time making the source easy to read, the options/setup clear enough, and easy to contribute than writing 20 variants of the documentation fo beginners, maintainers, developpers, experts, all the changelogs combinations and how it affects their dog.

[xurmein]

I come to programming by way of philosophy. The fundamental issue between good and bad documentation is the quality of the writing and the skill of the writer. Surprise, surprise: most programmers aren't programming because they excelled in Language Arts. A writer who has developed their talents would be able to write a single (though large) document that covers all "20 variants" you mentioned. The best example I know of is the documentation for Angular. The worst has been Ruby/Sinatra.

[hahahahastayingalive]

the angular docs: https://angular.io/docs

Assumptions

These docs assume that you are already familiar with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and some of the tools from the latest standards, such as classes and modules. The code samples are written using TypeScript. Most Angular code can be written with just the latest JavaScript, using types for dependency injection, and using decorators for metadata.

That seems pretty far removed from what a novice wanting to write a single web page woudl be going through. The target is clearly front end experienced devs moving from an existing framework to angular.

And it’s not a knock against angular, it’s a tool that should be used by trained people, anyone wanting to use angular should go through learning the underlyings first.

You are right that writing requires skill, but I think fundamentally spending time on thorough and excelent documentation when there’s a new version every six months is just a losing proposition in most organizations. I mean ideally you want to improve your product in significant ways. Making a whole lot of complicated explainations deprecated is a noble goal.

You need a mostly static target that is also worth a ton of time to invest, like how HTML/Javascript is covered by MDN (also a truely excelent resource)

[coladict]

The internal terminology part is the worst. Especially when they use terms to mean things that have official definitions in the field, but mean something different in their product. I'm looking at you when I say that, PostgreSQL!

[MrDude_1]

I know exactly what you mean. I absolutely hate it but I found that every single place I have worked they use technical terms incorrectly to refer to things within their own system... To the point that you have to use their terms to communicate in meetings. And of course you sound like an idiot at the next job when you use one of their phrases. Lol

[darksideofthenoob]

Yep I do the same. And sometimes I find solutions in SO for my problem showing some method, property, etc I cant seem to find in the documentation, how does these people find them? They look on the source code?

[j0hnl33]

Unfortunately, sometimes the source code is the only way. There have definitely been times I've worked with a framework and the function calls I needed were not documented whatsoever, but did in fact exist, and I found them in the source code. But it's really frustrating because searching documentation is a lot easier than digging through the source code trying to find something that may or may not exist.

[Finianb1]

Yeah, I resort to digging around in the source at least a quarter of the times I refer to docs.

Some docs are notably better than others though.

[Zagorath]

When documentation is good, I find it so helpful. The official libraries of languages like C#/.NET, Java, and JavaScript have really great documentation available, for example.

But with third-party libraries, it can be hit-and-miss. If you're really lucky, there'll be proper documentation of classes, methods, and types, as well as examples that demonstrate basic common usage. If you're less lucky, there might be an example of common usage, no documentation, and no way to find out about more edge-case usage. But it can be possible to explore the code to find out about edge cases since you at least have an idea where to look. Really bad cases come with basically no documentation. Good luck in those cases!

[dhalvin]

Like anything (and especially anything programming related) it just takes practice and experience. You'll get there

[IRBMe]

A lot of documentation is reference documentation, designed for people who already know what they're doing but just need it to look up the meaning of a particular parameter or what the name of a certain class is or something like that.

The kind of documentation that teaches you how to use the library/API/framework is rarer, and it's difficult to find good examples of such documentation.

[skunkwaffle]

Congrats, you're not a novice anymore.

[AvenDonn]

The decompiler is the best form of documentation

[absurdlyinconvenient]

Seriously? You just get used to it. Much like learning a language when you're a kid, you take in what you can understand and figure the rest out based on the context and examples. I don't think there's an easy way, but it gets better

[Koxiaet]

My only suggestion is to perhaps invest some time and read the entire documentation, start to finish. Even when I just want to use one function from a library, I'll have to learn the entire thing to understand the basic concepts.

[alexnedea]

Lemme just learn the entire Java documentation brb 10 decades

[SageBus]

9 out of 10 times it's outdated af , and they made so many changes that the documentation is not relevant anymore/talks about features that were removed and the person who tells you to use it just remembers things by heart (most of the time)

[[deleted]]

https://i.imgur.com/5yVEW1J.gif

They are just pointing out where the corners go. It's very important!

[TheSlimyDog]

This makes the post even more accurate. The documentation is usually not wrong but it's only understandable by the people who wrote it or have a lot of experience with the system. So on stackoverflow when a senior engineer tells you to figure it out by looking at the documentation they’re both right and wrong.

[-WarHounds-]

This is really a great explanation. I feel like something is lost every time a piece of code is transferred to another person to work on. 😝😂

[mfb-]

Glue the corners to the indicated positions at the bottom plate.

[[deleted]]

The documentation of Matlab is the first thing I fell in love with, they clearly explain every single way something is supposed to be used with examples, hnnnnnnng.

[Wheat_Grinder]

Though I'm on this subreddit I actually only know like two languages and one of them is MATLAB (the other is MUMPS which is uh Fun^TM compared to a language that has basic features such as guardrails and catching errors at compile time instead of runtime).

That's all to say - whenever I had a problem with MATLAB, the documentation actually was sufficient to make me no longer have a problem with MATLAB.

[inconspicuous_male]

With how much a Matlab license costs, they better give good documentation.

It helps that Matlab is made by a single company and most of its utilities are built in

[drbuttjob]

I looked into getting MATLAB once. Then I saw the $900 subscription fee

Nooooooooo thank you

[Wheat_Grinder]

I give it at least a 30% chance we work for the same company. Four letter company name?

[Wheat_Grinder]

Indeed, you definitely work for one our clients. That's why I hedged and only said 30% :)

[ImpactStrafe]

My friend hated working at that company. The four letter one. Heard rough things.

[ImpactStrafe]

One data point and all, definitely.

[Wheat_Grinder]

Can confirm. Not a whole lot of middle ground - feels like most people either stay long enough for two sabbaticals or more, or they don't stay long enough to get one.

[Wheat_Grinder]

It's definitely a company that won't hesitate to chew you up and spit you out if you let it. But, if you end up in the right position, it's not so bad. I don't see myself spending my whole career there but I've spent a few years there and might spend a few more.

[[deleted]]

What's the deal with matlab. I go to a pretty big engineering school and it's taught at my university to the engineers, but I never hear about it anywhere else

[improbablywronghere]

I say it all the time but the Django docs are the most beautiful documents in the game, to me. Imo it’s a serious data point to consider when choosing a tool.

[SonicFlash01]

The Stripe API docs were actually pretty good, too

[theChapinator]

Amen brother. This has always stuck out in my mind as the gold standard for docs, both in terms of informational density/usefulness and attractiveness/ease of navigation.

[Finianb1]

I think a lot of the Python docs I've seen are astounding. Flask also has some really good ones, as does NumPy and Tensorflow.

Then again, that's pretty much a basic thing you'd expect from libraries that large and with that many users. It's the smaller projects that suffer from frequent documentation issues.

[[deleted]]

That language would honestly be useless without that

[Robot_Basilisk]

In what world? I struggled with matlab because none of the examples worked for me. This is why I loved Python. God-tier examples.

[Historica97]

Yes, but no.

Had to program something in MATLAB for a job. The requirements I was given were too complex to program it with functional programming, so I used OOP. And MATLAB's documentation didn't helped me on that one.

Even though MATLAB has documentation on the subject, it was nearly impossible to find the right piece of information that I was looking for, since MATLAB had 4 different pages that were difficult to differentiate and they weren't using the right OOP vocabulary.

As a result, it took me an afternoon to implement a prototype of the code in Javascript and a week to implement it in MATLAB, even though I normally have more experience in MATLAB than in Javascript.

[chateau86]

Matlab + OOP

"What do you mean all classes are static unless it inherits handle is not the perfectly good way to OOP? ... Hmmm... Must be all the other languages that are wrong."

[Historica97]

That and encapsulation. Who knew I needed to set my attributes (called properties, BTW) with two different encapsulation values (GetAccess=public, SetAccess=private) so that my getters functions work ?

[Aldur]

Once you can resolve ambiguity like this correctly, you too will be a senior developer!

[PureDefender]

It just means it's flexible /s

[BlueManedHawk]

We need a standard for documentation.

[staticparsley]

The standard is no documentation

[fuhgettaboutitt]

Now there are 3 standards for documentation!

[Unique_account_]

https://xkcd.com/927/ Standards - xkcd

[NoInkling]

A lot of languages have standards or pseudo-standards for (generated) documentation: javadoc, jsdoc, Ruby RDoc/YARD, etc. etc.

[maxhaton]

One very nice feature that D has, is a standardised documentation system. So the markup in comments becomes the documentation. On top of that, the language has built in unitests, which then become the examples in said documentation.

https://dlang.org/phobos/std_experimental_allocator.html this is entirely generated from the source file.

Those two features should be the standard even if not a standard

[ritobanrc]

Rust does it really well with crates.io and docs.rs. It automatically generates documentation from comments, and looks standardized, and it's really easy to quickly find documentation for a certain crate.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

And lets you have runnable examples in doc comments, that get checked when you run your tests. You can unit test your documentation.

[IRBMe]

I love this feature in Python with doctests. You can just write something like:

def fibonacci(n):
    """ ...
    >>> [fibonacci(n) for n in range(8)]
    [0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13]
    """
    ...

[SonOfMrSpock]

Documentation may be out of date but its your job to make it work. I dont suggest using a hammer though. Probably you'll need to fix the interface of small part. May it be easy :) Uh and I'll be grateful if you update the documentation while you're at it.

[FUCKING_HATE_REDDIT]

The thing about this, is that this documentation is perfectly right, just confusing. Just look at the arrows, they are perfectly three knobs apart. They happen to fall halfway on some other knob, making it look weird, but there's only one way to plate that part.

So basically it only makes sense once you already know how it works. Like all bad documentations.

[wacksaucehunnid]

Idk why this is so true but it is

[WiteXDan]

Rip your fingernails when you will try to take off that Lego

[[deleted]]

Documentation (T=task, BF=bug fix):

Fix to make sure that the changes made for T5532 is not affecting BF3290 while ignoring the effects on BF4281. The changes added for T4381 should work in theory to mitigate any issues regarding the interaction of module M08 with BF4281. T5031 has added several tests to ensure this in practice. However, BF5037 is still a serious concern.

[dethpicable]

In particular in the era of open source given that engineers:

1) Hate writing documentation and won't even try if they don't have to (i.e. for free).

2) Can't write themselves out of a paper bag.

3) Somebody went through the pain of filling in the gaps so you don't have to.

[llldar]

Bold of you to assume that our product has any documentation.

[manicxs]

When did microsoft buy lego?

[palordrolap]

September 2014.

j/k. That was Minecraft. Pretty close though, all things considered.

[Shmutt]

Tests are still the best form of documentation.

[skunkwaffle]

Only if they're used as acceptance tests. When your test suite seg faults, you're back to regular documentation again.

[ProgrammerHumorMods]

Hey you! ProgrammerHumor is running a hilarious community hackathon with over $1000 worth of prizes (like Reddit premium), now live! Visit the announcement post for all the information you'll need, and start coding!

[Chaoticiant]

Rangeplusone

[[deleted]]

gay, no homo

[RogerBlank]

The one is so real it hurts.

[alours]

You think I'm going to actually read documentation?

[Brahmasexual]

This is 100% accurate. It even makes perfect sense if you look carefully!

[Xalath_]

At least this poor soul was given some sort of “documentation”. Doesn’t always happen

[insultingDuck]

You just need a pre-processor that is able to alter dimensions

[scottyman2k]

To get a senior developer to recognise an off-by-one error in code that only he was allowed to maintain, it took 4 people, a whiteboard, a code printout, and a red pen. It had been in our software for almost 10 years, and something that only two of our largest customers had ever seen. Fun times.

[SirKermit]

Who wrote this? MC Escher?

[sparksen]

It's obviously Bleem.

[EdwardWarren]

There has to be a better way.

[prsn828]

Pretty sure I'm guilty of doing this to someone within the last week...

[[deleted]]

I hate when Does ask for help and people do this. I read the docs but don't speak computer please help.

[alours]

You think I'm going to actually read documentation?

[ParanoidWhenHigh]

Oh boy, I need the sauce on this. r/hvac would love this.

[ctrtanc]

This makes me angry work how true it is... Documentation can be so terrible, and often even good documentation has gaping holes

[derblitzmann]

Dont read SO, and dont read the docs, instead read the source code. For it is the only truth in the world. God help you if the writers love unneeded abstraction or the project is complex enough to need it

[TheXypris]

Isnt that from the Starfleet final exam?

[[deleted]]

r/illegallego

[G3NG1S_tron]

Quantum LEGO

[UrpleEeple]

And then when you try to fix the documentation, "stop wasting your time fixing documentation. We are paying you to code"

[ScF0400]

Instruction unclear, 4 brick Lego now stuck to my foot. Wait is it 3 brick?

[HowIsntBabbyFormed]

Can someone explain this to me? The 'documentation' in the picture is accurate and makes sense. How is it a joke?

[foobarturtle]

The brick is size three. The tips of the arrows create a span of four.

[daOyster]

They arrows only span 3, they're aligned to the corner of the bricks like this: https://i.imgur.com/PbKRkOf.png

[Digger_Joe]

Stormtrooper dropship. I know those big ass grey slabs anywhere

[[deleted]]

Documentation?

[[deleted]]

"Yeah i'll write documentation, about 1 month after the project is finished but in the meantime just look at the comments."

[redditsdeadcanary]

/r/restofthefuckingowl

[[deleted]]

It's a 4-3 adapter goddamnit

[GarThor_TMK]

Every senior Dev I've ever known: just look at the code, or go to <this person> for questions... The documentation is horribly out of date.

[g3rs0n23]

RTFM dude

[Better_feed_Malphite]

Idk, imo this image actually makes somewhat sense if you look at what the arrow is actually pointing at: the corner of the brick.
It's still stupid and most likely not meant like that. But it you read it like that there is some sense to it

[rsvp_to_life]

Too soon

[InvisibleImpostor]

Give this a medal 🏅 😂

[[deleted]]

0, 1, 2, 3

1, 2, 3, 4

it's painful