Is "prerequisite knowledge" a foreign concept to people these days? When I started writing extensions for Blender, I had to do a lot of legwork to understand the bpy module, and even more fucking legwork to understand Python itself, all that on top of the general knowledge of programming and algorithms from high school.

RTFM means that you should use the available resources to learn. There's a whole internet full of them. There are no shortcuts to understanding, and you can't expect every task-oriented guide to explain how to write a main().

[–] RunJun@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

There’s amazing and terrible manuals everywhere. One of the key things is defining target audience. From there you define experience and knowledge.

If a manual is intended to be for a broad audience interacting with something new, then you use the lowest level reading level that still makes your point. From there you work on flow because there’s a 1000 ways to skin a cat.

If LEGO manuals were only written step by step instructions, at a college reading level, then they miss a key demographic. Yet, people would still walk around like “That’s a perfectly cromulent instruction manual!” Technically they would be correct but it misses the point.

[–] SmartmanApps@programming.dev 1 points 1 week ago

There’s amazing

IBM

and terrible manuals everywhere.

Microsoft

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