Yeah, the knowledge that 6 hours of debugging can save you from 10 long and extenuating minutes of reading the documentation. That one you can only get by fixing the problem.
Docs can only really help you if your problem is “I have used X from the library Y, yet I do not understand the baseline definition of X sufficiently and this is causing issues”. A lot of problems in practice are much more fundamental than that
there’s a level of knowledge which only comes from fixing a break
Yeah, the knowledge that 6 hours of debugging can save you from 10 long and extenuating minutes of reading the documentation. That one you can only get by fixing the problem.
Docs can only really help you if your problem is “I have used X from the library Y, yet I do not understand the baseline definition of X sufficiently and this is causing issues”. A lot of problems in practice are much more fundamental than that
You sound like the guy who writes documentation in the form of:
// functionA = is function that does A
/s