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!

>> "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.

I don't think that's what he means by the advice. I think it's more about systematic knowledge vs. fragmented knowledge. Someone who "learns" through an LLM or Stack Overflow is not going to have the overall knowledge of the tool to be able to reason what's available, so will tend to use it in very stereotyped ways and do things in harder ways because they don't know what's possible. You can still get that systematic knowledge through an accessible text.