I was somewhat dismissive, but I agree that this way of thinking about dependencies is the right approach for systems programming. And it is fair to expect that users will read the manual in detail for any tool or library they adopt in the contexts where C is used.
It's just a bit frustrating to deal with so many names that are hard to understand and remember. C-style naming forces you to refer to the docs more often, and the docs are usually more sparse and less accessible than in other ecosystems. Man pages are relatively robust and they were a delight back in the day, but they have not been the gold standard for decades, and the documentation conventions for third-party libraries tend to be quite weak.
A distressing number of softwar engineers have overly accurate memories and don't notice when things become excessively cryptic or arcane.
However the implementations being much more open source now means a lot of bad documentation can be overcome with code reading or, if needed, stepping thru the code with a debugger. Wrong documentation is still expensive. I have a bitter taste in my mouth from integrating with OpenTelemetry Go libraries. It seems to be sorted now in 1.27and q
28 but 1.24 and for a few versions the docs were wrong, the examples were not transferable, and it took 5x the time it should have.
It's just a bit frustrating to deal with so many names that are hard to understand and remember. C-style naming forces you to refer to the docs more often, and the docs are usually more sparse and less accessible than in other ecosystems. Man pages are relatively robust and they were a delight back in the day, but they have not been the gold standard for decades, and the documentation conventions for third-party libraries tend to be quite weak.