Cool but nobody’s about to link to prerequisite information like typing on a keyboard.

they say to someone who does indeed link to all pre-requisite knowledge. 😂 You know some Tech people do indeed recommend doing a touch-typing course, right?

Same for math, a book focusing on integration isn’t going to say “read this book for the basics of addition btw”

I'm a Maths teacher. You'll find that Maths textbooks do indeed run through any pre-requisites for the topic. e.g. "We discussed back in Chapter 2...".

And why should one even cater to that?

Because it's useless to a large chunk of your audience if you don't.

If a person is interested enough they can just… look up the things they don’t understand,

No they just can't, not when no information at all has been given on what this is so that you have something to search for. See Microsoft doco where they use TLA's, don't tell you what the TLA is short for, don't link to any information about the TLA, and searching for "TLA" (since they've not told you what TLA is short for) fails to bring up any information about this thing they are talking about. Now the tutorial is completely useless to you because you have no idea what they're talking about and can't find anything about what they're talking about. "Draw the rest of the owl"

that’s not exactly hard

It's very hard when you have no search keywords at all to work with.

a responsibility to somehow make complicated topics easy

That's what tutorials are for! 😂

usually written by Charles Petzold

Classic example of someone who wrote tutorials like the type being satirised.

If it’s worthwhile doing it’s hard

Writing good tutorials isn't hard. You just have to not assume background knowledge of anything you're writing about. If you write it for beginners, then literally anyone can follow it.

And you don’t need to warn me that an “s” is coming.

No idea what you're talking about.

you have no experience with that particular thing

In other words, you are a beginner with that particular thing.

It’s not for someone who has never used any of those technologies

It might be if that is what they are needing to learn. Reading tutorials is usually needs-driven. Think inheriting legacy code

doesn’t understand anything about them

You know that's what tutorials are for in the first place, right?

Ah, I can see you never write tutorials,

Ah, I can see you've never written any good tutorials

You have no idea what you’re talking about

Says someone who just said someone with no experience at something is somehow not a beginner with it 😂

I’m sorry to tell you, friend, that your article does this too

Nope.

You don’t explain what XAML is, for instance

You know the article is about how to write a page and NOT use XAML, right?? 😂 If you don't know what it is then you don't need to (hence why I point out that it isn't pre-requisite knowledge). If you do know what it is then that's probably what brought you to my page to begin with - stop using it! 😂

Certain sentences almost read like the satire you posted:

Now read the links provided in the pre-requisite knowledge. You're the second person who thinks people learn things by reading the first paragraph only.

You also tell the reader to “edit the relevant line” which doesn’t help a total beginner

Now read the links in the pre-requisite knowledge, clone the repo, follow the instructions up to that point in the article, and guess which line you're on! 😂

I’m sure you’ll get there eventually

It's there already, if you had just bothered reading it all and following the instructions, instead of just criticising without even trying it

Just keep in mind that most people do not want to be technical writers

Probably because of people like you who criticise them without even trying to follow the directions to begin with. I'm guessing you also submit issues which say "It doesn't work. Please fix"

it would have to explain to people “how do you use a keyboard”

No it wouldn't. You just link to resources about pre-requisite knowledge.

and everything from there upwards

Nope. Exact same thing applies to all pre-requisite knowledge.

For 99% of people almost all that is about as understandable as Greek

Now scroll down to the pre-requisite knowledge which has links to things explaining ALL of that.

how many people out there in the whole World (non-IT people as illustrated in the actual article linked by the OP) do you think know what the hell is “Visual Studio”, “.Net”, “Multi-platform Application User Interface”, “template”, “C#”, “XAML”, “binding” (in this context)

Exact same number as there is people capable of clicking on the provided links about them in the pre-requisite knowledge section.

which is maybe level 4 and they’ll be totally lost,

...until they read the links in the pre-requisite knowledge, and then they will understand all of it.

I think you’re so way beyond the average person in your expertise in this domain

says person who didn't even scroll past the introductory paragraph! 😂 You think people try to learn things by reading only the introductory paragraph?? 😂

you don’t even begin to suspect just how little of our domain the average person knows compared to an mere programmer

And yet, weirdly, if you keep reading you'll find it caters to people who know nothing about it 😂

As a software developer with 10+ years in .Net.

I was forced to try and use it as a brand new to Microsoft (not just .NET, all of Microsoft) programmer (my experience was in other ecosystems). Not recommended.

“first, install npm and npx and npy and npppp2 and then run ‘npz create-huge-boilerplate-folder’. Now go edit arbitrarily_named_file.yaml to add requirements a, b, and banana. Now you can edit path/to/hidden/entrypoint.jsx to return ‘Hello, World!’ and then run ‘npz bloated-dev-http-server’ and navigate to http://127.0.0.1:9001/index to view it! Simple!”

Yep, Microsoft doco is like that too

There’s amazing

IBM

and terrible manuals everywhere.

Microsoft

that you already put in more effort than one can expect by writing a tutorial to begin with

Nope. If a job is worth doing, it's worth doing well.

Is “prerequisite knowledge” a foreign concept to people these days?

Apparently so.

RTFM means that you should use the available resources to learn

Except the manuals are written like this, and don't cover pre-requisite knowledge at all - don't even link to it!

There’s a whole internet full of them

Microsoft doco "now add TLA to it", don't say what TLA is, don't link to what TLA is, searching for TLA doesn't tell you what it is. There most certainly is a whole internet full of blogs about "TLA", but I don't even have any keywords, and can't find any of the "TLA" that Microsoft is talking about. The documentation is literally useless to anyone who doesn't already know what "TLA" is.

There are no shortcuts to understanding

There are no shortcuts to writing good documentation

you can’t expect every task-oriented guide to explain how to write a main().

But you can certainly expect them to link to resources about pre-requisite knowledge, like I did in Creating MAUI UI's in C#.

Not to mention this is mostly in unpaid FOSS

Paid documentation writers at Microsoft are absolutely horrible at it too. That's why I can relate to the post so much