Really makes me wonder how much some programmers really understood programming 5 years ago if this is the reaction to a very recent knowledge center being down.

I suppose the equivalent would be Google search being down 10 years ago and being forced to read man pages again. Annoying but not literally "snow day" levels of lost productivity.

I did an experiment with some co-workers around a decade ago, and one of the results was most of that group learning for the first time it was possible to train yourself to read code more easily. I was self-taught and had been doing it for so long, combined with some very specific pressures as a teacher's assistant for years, that I learned to read code in programming languages I understand about as easily as I can read English - something they had never even considered possible before.

I never did find out how they see code, but I have to imagine the right verb for them was "deciphering" instead of "reading"...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7248842

Software documentation was a little different when it went through a publication process as a part of a larger waterfall. I was going to say better but I'm not sure about that part, but it was certainly verbose.

To be fair most code in most shops I worked for since 2011 was crap with some notable exceptions. People came and went, teams forgot why code was written or what it did, or randomly rewrote stuff that just worked to replace it with crap that didn't, over-enthusiastic rookies wrote over-complicated code to impress their seniors, early code debt was calcified into impossible monstrosities that couldn't be refactored without bringing entire systems down, etc.

But I'm sure in a few years AI will be so good we won't have to worry about any of that anymore. After all, it's not like those systems learn how to code by reading our code, is it?