I feel like coding in general has broken down. I used to do a lot of coding until about 5 years ago. Back then Google still worked, stack overflow still worked - at least in my memory.
Now I'm coming back to coding and I'm having trouble reading a MP4 video and showing one frame as an image using python. I've never done it, but it's a simple task. Except Google keeps sending me to the wrong libraries (the ones that don't work or are badly documented), and I end up hitting bugs and error messages that seem impossible to google either.
Without a working search engine, and with the proliferation of a huge number of weakly documented or poorly working libraries, coding new things by yourself is really not fun anymore.
(Or maybe I'm getting old and just don't have the patience to spend any amount of time on seemingly trivial tasks and boilerplate?)
Video is just complicated. The libraries have to be native, because of performance (even if you don't need the performance, the kind of person who writes a video decoder from scratch will), so they have to be built as a c extension. Which means you need a c build environment, and all the complexities of setting that up. And then the api will be "bent" around high performance patterns, which might not be obvious if you're new to that field. I remember when I first did some graphics programming I couldn't understand why people were using char* all over the place instead of a 2d array class which contained instances of a Color class with all sorts of fancy getters and setters. After a few years working with graphics code that question just doesn't seem reasonable anymore, my frame of reference has changed. If I were to write docs about a new library I made, it would be hard for me to write for a new person, even if I was a good writer, and genuinely tried. Many makers of open source libraries are not, and do not try (and noone's paying them to, so why should they, if they don't want to).
So yeah, basically, I think it is just a hard problem in easy problem's clothing.
Now I'm coming back to coding and I'm having trouble reading a MP4 video and showing one frame as an image using python. I've never done it, but it's a simple task. Except Google keeps sending me to the wrong libraries (the ones that don't work or are badly documented), and I end up hitting bugs and error messages that seem impossible to google either.
Without a working search engine, and with the proliferation of a huge number of weakly documented or poorly working libraries, coding new things by yourself is really not fun anymore.
(Or maybe I'm getting old and just don't have the patience to spend any amount of time on seemingly trivial tasks and boilerplate?)