> Everyone was far more likely to get wrong answers off StackOverflow than reading the (recommended to them) manual.
In my experience, a system is never really fully documented until it's been used widely enough that everything's been documented 5 times over by different people.
For example, I'm sure your favourite language's developers did a great job at documenting the regular expression system. They've probably given you 5,000 words of documentation, maybe 10,000, on regular expressions alone.
But if you want to remove all the emojis from a text file - does the documentation tell you how to do that? If you're using Python or Java or sed it doesn't.
The vast majority of the stuff in our dead tree library pertains to what would now be considered ancient tech, computer-wise going back as far as the PDP-8. The problem with searching for Internet answers on that stuff is, most of the time, you'll at best find someone who's interested in diligently hacking on it. What you often run into is someone looking for answers to homework (e.g. the Intel 8085 is still used in a lot of Indian colleges, apparently) or trying to make something "just work" for Internet cool points.
In my experience, a system is never really fully documented until it's been used widely enough that everything's been documented 5 times over by different people.
For example, I'm sure your favourite language's developers did a great job at documenting the regular expression system. They've probably given you 5,000 words of documentation, maybe 10,000, on regular expressions alone.
But if you want to remove all the emojis from a text file - does the documentation tell you how to do that? If you're using Python or Java or sed it doesn't.