*gently grabs the cheeks of all programmers to stare deeply into their eyes*

[wordman@dice.camp]

@CorvidCrone I don't think it is programmers you need to convince of this.

[darkmatterzine@mastodon.social]

@CorvidCrone yes, this. I love a good manual. Contents, index and a good search function.
Hubby has been told over the years that one of the reasons he’s such a good programmer is that he notates his code as he goes so it’s easy for others to see what he’s done and, later, to modify it without causing a chain reaction.

[cyancqueak@dice.camp]

@dequbed @drwho @CorvidCrone pleasingly the ANSYS of 2007 came with a manual that told you everything that every function and setting did. Those were the days of the GUI mostly being a tool to write a text file for the computational bit.

[nlarson830@techhub.social]

@CorvidCrone

<whiny voice>
"Bbut instruction manuals are haaard."

Extra steps that are important:
1) Have that technical writer's work vetted by the people that wrote the software.
2) Bare minimum make the manual available as a PDF, ideally a printed on paper manual TOO!

[oldmankris@mastodon.xyz]

@gilesgoat @CorvidCrone I was so lucky in my first job: my cubicle was right next to all the shelves of VMS and other OS docs. Nice to browse through during the two-hour compile times.

[tusharhero@mathstodon.xyz]

@CorvidCrone GNU Info manuals are good

[tusharhero@mathstodon.xyz]

@resuna @CorvidCrone Info manuals are strictly superior to man pages though.

[resuna@ohai.social]

@tusharhero @CorvidCrone

More verbose, anyway. Harder to use as references. Like the difference between a document and a website.

[haui@mastodon.giftedmc.com]

@CorvidCrone
Most sane take on the fedi in a week.

[dequbed@mastodon.chaosfield.at]

@cyancqueak @drwho @CorvidCrone yeah, a bunch of software just uses GUIs for nicer setup of the batch processing pipeline. Those are all fine, turns out we have by now figured out batch processing
Biggest issue with batch processing is the very slow feedback cycle for errors, but that's solved by aiming for slower churn and more slack for unexpected errors and any work envionment that does that is better off for it anyway ^^

[gilesgoat@toot.wales]

@oldmankris @CorvidCrone Actually I was in the room where they had the shelf with the VMS manuals Which was a sort of 'storeroom' where we were in 3 people in. I used to work at that time with systems that came with 'massive HW manuals' and we had to write SW for and I mean those type of manuals where even the panel screws were listed and had a code like 0039-11537528 or such Mind you often some manuals were sold separately at high price. I remember things like the X.25 book and such ..

[zdl@mstdn.social]

@CorvidCrone Compassionate fucking Buddha this!

[roly@mastodon.sdf.org]

@CorvidCrone preach it brother preach it loud ++

[teledyn@mstdn.ca]

@CorvidCrone

One year, long ago, at Comdex, a local firing range offered the chance to shoot anything inanimate with the heat of your choosing.

The top draw was IBM manuals, with Uzis.

Just saying'

[lhauser@mefi.social]

@clew @cavyherd @CorvidCrone I learned about concordances from Strong's Bible Concordance...a huge, hardbound volume, bigger than any Bible I ever possessed.

[cavyherd@wandering.shop]

@lhauser @clew @CorvidCrone

"Dude! You think there's a lot of data? Just wait until you see the metadata!"

[benartycomputer@mastodon.scot]

@CorvidCrone if like to add a note to this if I may ?

I don't want to watch a fucking YouTube video either

[capnthommo@c.im]

@CorvidCrone yes. I want to look on a simply organised manual. And if it's translated from another language I want for them to have stumped up for a proof-reader who's actually familiar with English as it's used. Just to tidy up the sometimes sort of correct but strangulated usages.