Re: (Getting rid of) man pages

[Josh Stern <jstern at citilink dot com>]

If anyone ever introduces a replacement format for manpages,
it should be one that requires a sample of example usage (perhaps
listed at the bottom of the page, or accessible through a hyperlink)
for each of the major features of the utility in question
(this isn't a problem for pages that document APIs).

It would be an interesting thought experiment to try and estimate
the amount, in dollars, of productivity that could have been
saved by allowing people to quickly see examples of the major
syntactic forms and usage of utilities that they are not
familiar with - I think that a number described as "many billions"
would be an appropriate guess.  It shouldn't matter whether
some originator thought of manpages as only a reminder for
the already initiated - in practice they have come to serve
as primary, and sometimes only documentation for the command line
interface on many systems.

- Josh