> It's unfortunate that people no longer dive into original system/program documentation, but google/ask for quick answer.
>Similarly you may noticed how you can no longer write code comfortably when being offline, because you cannot google "how to make dict() return default value for non existing key" etc.
A large reason for this is the change that has occurred over time from old-school Unix type tools to newer tools. In many cases, the newer languages simply have no documentation available locally.
I.e., in my Slackware system, I have ():
1,596 man pages for glibc functions
896 man pages for Perl
155 man pages for Tcl functions
88 man pages for Tk functions
1 man page for Python
One can "code disconnected" reasonably well in C/C++, Perl, or Tcl/Tk because the tools also installed documentation for all the functions contained therein. But, with Python, without a separate set of docs, or internet access, one is lost if one needs to "look something up". Plus, jumping out of one's editor (or switching to another xterm) to run "man 3 printf" to look-up a particular obscure percent escape is loads faster than googling for the same. There is an advantage to having full local documentation installed. But it seems that the advantage has been lost on some tools.
() count obtained by grep and wc -l on Slackware's packages files
From the python man page: "Documentation for installed Python modules and packages can be viewed by running the pydoc program." pydoc is part of the standard Python installation (though it might be broken out into a separate package on some Linux distros) and equivalent to the man pages for Perl and Tcl.
Java, on the other hand, typically only has the HTML javadocs. And once you get outside libc, documentation for C/C++ libraries is all over the place in formatting and accessibility with standard tools.
Python does provide internal documentation tools via docstrings and the processing/viewing system for them (and the documentation for the standard library is generally good). You might also have a local copy of the online documentation installed (the package is usually named something like python-doc).
The lack of comprehensive offline documentation that seems to be becoming more and more common even for large projects is rather troubling, though.
>Similarly you may noticed how you can no longer write code comfortably when being offline, because you cannot google "how to make dict() return default value for non existing key" etc.
A large reason for this is the change that has occurred over time from old-school Unix type tools to newer tools. In many cases, the newer languages simply have no documentation available locally.
I.e., in my Slackware system, I have ():
One can "code disconnected" reasonably well in C/C++, Perl, or Tcl/Tk because the tools also installed documentation for all the functions contained therein. But, with Python, without a separate set of docs, or internet access, one is lost if one needs to "look something up". Plus, jumping out of one's editor (or switching to another xterm) to run "man 3 printf" to look-up a particular obscure percent escape is loads faster than googling for the same. There is an advantage to having full local documentation installed. But it seems that the advantage has been lost on some tools.() count obtained by grep and wc -l on Slackware's packages files