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Muvasa | 4 months ago

Documentation is not meant for learning. It's to be used as a reference. It's like learning medicine by reading a medical dictionary.

discuss

order

0x457|4 months ago

Yes, and? You can definitely learn how to do something by reading relevant references.

Muvasa|4 months ago

How would you go about it. Let's say I want to learn how to do x in library y. How am I gonna find x. When library y has it's own idiosyncraties. In the library the concept is named differently so searching through the documentation yields nothing. Let's say you find what you are looking for. You read the documentation. And it makes no sense like if I was learning haskell and I searched for a monad and got "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors". It's a ineficient process.

Documentation is the most helpful when you already know something and want to learn the specifics. Or when you are already using something and have an issue and want to figure out why.

EDIT: Another issue I just came up. Structure is very important. It's good to know how to sum before how to multiply. It's so important having a hand crafted pathway leads to rapid success like MathAcademy does.