Talk:1343: Manuals

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Revision as of 21:13, 17 March 2014 by 108.162.221.84 (talk)
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Your line counts may vary for the man pages, depending on what distribution you are running and what version of man you're using (and god forbid, what version of wc). ‎108.162.221.51 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Mine comes in at 1806 lines. So even more unwieldy. (Ubuntu 13.10) 108.162.216.74 14:36, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
1,743 here... but that's still only medium length; g++ weighs in at 14,148 (Fedora 20). 173.245.52.29 19:09, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

I seem to remember some info page starting with “how to read this manual”… can’t find it though. --108.162.254.162 10:00, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

I believe the implication is that the "how to read this manual" section is a manual for the manual. This could be characterized as an instance of recursion. 173.245.54.52 16:07, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Cool. I had been wondering what that grammar-description syntax was called and how it worked. Now I know where to read about it! I do wonder about how true the cartoon is, though. Notepad does not require a manual or tutorial, but vi and Emacs do. Jim E (talk) 16:10, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Did you seriously just compare a Windows and a Unix tool? In my opinion though, notepad/nano are more useful. 108.162.221.43 17:49, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
Trolling? Spongebog (talk) 19:24, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Is this spelling correct: "that tool tends", but "these tools tend"? I'm not native English so maybe someone can help. --Dgbrt (talk) 20:47, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Yes, those are both correct English. "That tool" is singular while "these tools" is plural, thus the verbs are (singular) "tends" and (plural) "tend". There is a mistake in the fourth bullet where the person who wrote the explanation said "most worse" (should have said "worst": "But the worst tools...").

Could this comic itself be considered a manual for how to determine whether a tool causes or creates problems? 173.245.54.89 21:02, 17 March 2014 (UTC)