Time for the update!
I haven't taken much notes on these ones but still found them somewhat useful.
Next week will be the last 2 chapters of the book, so we might want to start brainstorming ideas for the next one.


Chapter 17: Portability

This chapter talk about Unix and its tooling/language portability.
It goes through the history of C, from its inception, standard creation
and others. I'm not so interested in this but it's still nice to read.
It goes through a similar discussion about the story of standards.

I didn't know about gettext, weirdly or coincidentally, in a lot of
software the translation layer has the same name.

Chapter 18: Documentation

Quote:I've never met a human being who would want to read 17,000 pages of
documentation, and if there was, I'd kill him to get him out of the
gene pool. -- Joseph Costello

Welcome to nixers. (kidding)

The survey of docs format, or as the author calls them Zoo of docs
formats, shows how much of a mess it is. However, in my opinion, it also
shows that there's flexibility an options.

For me, any documentation is good documentation, as long as its
understandable, and present.


Two quotes especially caught my attention.

Quote:Most software documentation is written by technical writers for the
least-common-denominator ignorant — the knowledgeable writing for
the knowledgeless. The documentation that ships with Unix systems has
traditionally been written by programmers for their peers. Even when it
is not peer-to-peer documentation, it tends to be influenced in style
and format by the enormous mass of programmer-to-programmer documentation
that ships with Unix systems.

Quote:The advice we gave earlier in the chapter about reading Unix documentation
can be turned around. When you write documentation for people within
the Unix culture, don't dumb it down. If you write as if for idiots,
you will be written off as an idiot yourself. Dumbing documentation
down is very different from making it accessible; the former is lazy and
omits important things, whereas the latter requires careful thought and
ruthless editing.

These are perfectly said. It's very hard to explain something in an
approachable way, while still going into the right technicalities.

I think the author predicted this well, HTML/XML won, and local docs are
dwindling. Many tools don't even come with a manpage anymore.
We're often left with autogenerated pages based on the code.

And on the docbook dizzying conversion stuff, we also got pandoc, which
is pretty good.