More seriously, I think that we have been trained to rely on just in time searches (or ChatGPT sessions) when we encounter the next thing we need to learn. RTFM is just so time consuming and I personally don't recall everything I have read, leading me to rely on search/AI to re-learn the next thing just in time anyways.
In some ways this is a vast improvement, which is why it's the default behavior now. Why cream your brain with information you might never use?
But it DEFINITELY has a weakness in that you don't know what you don't know. I never knew about this 'trap' trick, for example... and I didn't know I didn't know it, despite it being something I see as quite useful.
Side note: I think RTFM has historically meant "try to find the answer first before asking for it", leading to me designating LMGTFY (Let Me Google That For You) as the modern equivalent in this just in time searches reality we live in. I wonder how long it will be before we start saying LMAAIFY (Let Me Ask AI For You)...
The thing is that reading the manual isn't easy. If it was, everyone would do it, because the benefit is that, eventually, you know every topic or section that appears in the bash man page, and then eventually you know most of what that page says about most of those features. These efforts compound over time. If you reach that point, you know that if you don't know of a feature in that software, it doesn't exist. You eventually get a shape of the feature set, often as it was intended to be used by the author of the tool.
You can spend twice as much time over twice as many years reading random blog posts and googling, and you'll have no cohesive, comprehensive picture of the full tool and all its features. In this case, if you look at `man bash` and find the trap builtin function you'll learn about the DEBUG and ERR traps, for example, which I didn't see mentioned in the discussion here. These things might be useful to just file away; in case you ever need it someday, then you'll know it's there and exactly where to find it, not some half-remembered blog post you can't find again.
Over ten or twenty years, the difference between these two habits is night and day. The people who read the documentation first, and only then ask for help, and the people who ask for help first and get it and so never read the docs, end up in a totally different place with respect to overall confidence and comfort with the tools. Reading the man page means you don't get your answer right away, it's slower, less enjoyable, and less fun than googling. It's competing with content that was literally filtered by an engagement selection process. Of course it's less immediate gratification. The only reason people will do it is if they internalize the habit long enough to appreciate the benefits.
"RTFM" was a bit of social shaming, to tell people "don't be lazy, the answer you seek is literally in the documentation, please just read it". Shaming strangers on the internet turns out to not work well at scale, so generally we don't do this now, and the message just doesn't get passed on at all.
I've been shocked at the attitude even in some companies that reading docs is some kind of unnecessary or obsolete practice. As you say, it's become the default option to seek answers online. A culture of reading documentation still exists, but now it has to be maintained inside organizations that care about it, because it's no longer understood as the basic professional attitude.
I agree with the sentiment, but a there is a caveat: not all documentation is created equal.
There's incomplete documentation. There's API documentation without examples (ie specification but no example/tutorial). There's outdated documentation!
I can also say that I started studying SQL by reading the docs for mysql, and after an hour I was still stuck inside INSERT or SELECT. Reading about all use cases in detail was not useful to learn a first approach to the queries!
So I'd say that this "truism" isn't always true. Sometimes the docs suck or don't provide the info you need at that time.
> Over ten or twenty years, the difference between these two habits is night and day. The people who read the documentation first, and only then ask for help, and the people who ask for help first and get it and so never read the docs, end up in a totally different place with respect to overall confidence and comfort with the tools.
More seriously, I think that we have been trained to rely on just in time searches (or ChatGPT sessions) when we encounter the next thing we need to learn. RTFM is just so time consuming and I personally don't recall everything I have read, leading me to rely on search/AI to re-learn the next thing just in time anyways.
In some ways this is a vast improvement, which is why it's the default behavior now. Why cream your brain with information you might never use?
But it DEFINITELY has a weakness in that you don't know what you don't know. I never knew about this 'trap' trick, for example... and I didn't know I didn't know it, despite it being something I see as quite useful.
Side note: I think RTFM has historically meant "try to find the answer first before asking for it", leading to me designating LMGTFY (Let Me Google That For You) as the modern equivalent in this just in time searches reality we live in. I wonder how long it will be before we start saying LMAAIFY (Let Me Ask AI For You)...