The best programmers I know

> "Don’t go to Stack Overflow, don’t ask the LLM, don’t guess, just go straight to the source. Oftentimes, it’s surprisingly accessible and well-written."

It's a bit like math books. I dreaded reading formal math during my engineering -- always read accessible text. Got a little better in my master's and could read demse chapters which got to the point quickly. At least now I can appreciate why people write terse references, even Tutte books.

Some references are a pleasure to use. For rust crates, I always go to docs.rs and search there. It's just fantastic. i can search for a function that returns a particular type or accept a particular type etc. hoogle from Haskell was lovely too when I took a functional programming course in college. Cpp reference is also pretty good -- thanks for adding examples.

Today I was reading boto3 python library docs, and I immediately missed docs.rs!

I haven't used Haskell in years, but I still find myself wishing for Hoogle no matter the tool I'm using. Being able to just go "I know I want a value of type X, what functions return type X?" is so useful. I think Scala may be the only other language I have used whose docs let you search by type signature like that.

I have been playing around with Zig a lot lately, and their doc system is quite nice too. I particularly like how they will embed the source of how what you are looking at is implemented, and often an example of how it is expected to be used. Being able to see the language in action all over the docs has helped with making it super easy to pick up. Being able to search based on type signature a la Hoogle would really be killer though.