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Examples are the best documentation

(rakhim.exotext.com)
401 points Bogdanp | 1 comments | 09 Oct 25 19:34 UTC | HN request time: 0.201s | source
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bigstrat2003 ◴[10 Oct 25 07:03 UTC] No.45536084[source]▶
Similarly, unix man pages desperately need examples. They are almost without fail written as an exhaustive reference for someone who already knows how to use the tool, which is a totally valid use case. But that means they're generally useless for someone trying to use a tool for the first time. Good documentation needs to have both.
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1. cantor_S_drug ◴[10 Oct 25 14:31 UTC] No.45539542[source]▶
I liked it when Stackoverflow did something similar.

https://stackoverflow.com/documentation

We have shut down Stack Overflow Documentation. Documentation was our attempt at improving existing reference materials by focusing on examples. The beta ran from July 21st, 2016 until August 8th, 2017. For more details on why we ended it, please see our post on meta. Thank you to everyone that participated. As always, the content contributed by our community is available under CC BY-SA.