I am developing a simple HTML5 game with Unity. The experience reminded me of my post about Rust and led me to coin a new term that I'd like to discuss today.

Ladies and gentlemen, in the spirit of Object-Oriented Programming I present to you Internet-Oriented Software Development (IOSD): a style of software development in which the official way to program is by trying something, giving up, asking strangers on the internet, and hoping for the best.

You may wonder: how is this new, seeing as that's what we are all already doing? The keyword here is "official". If you want to program with (say) Keras during a long trip with unreliable internet, you could do it with an offline version of the API reference alone. Sure, getting the offline docs will take a bit of work, but at least there's an official repository of knowledge that you can always go to. Of course you can search on the wider internet for help too, but you don't have to.

IOSD is different: when you release IOSD software you publish an okay guide to your software, and that's it. There is no need for you to keep it up to date nor for it to be useful, because your documentation is Internet-Oriented: if someone has a problem, they can ask the internet, IRC channels, their co-workers, anyone but you.

Rust came to mind because, as I complained before, that's how their intended development cycle apparently works: if you don't know how to do something, you are encouraged to either search the forums or ask the developers. In the later case, "we don't know, we won't do it, and we won't tell you who is doing it right" is a possible response. TensorFlow used to be like that too (ask me about the Seq2Seq tutorial!), but they reversed course and their current official suggestion is that you use Keras (no, seriously).

But Unity is an even better example. For starters, the official docs are essentially useless because they tell you what something does but neither why nor what to use it for. Can you guess in which situations is a Sprite renderer required, and what do you need it for? Because I can't. One might argue that Unity Learn is where you should look for answers, in which case one would be wrong. Taking the first course in the "Game development" section, for instance, gets you this tutorial which is only valid for an outdated version of Unity.

No, the real source of answers are YouTube tutorials. Sure, sometimes they refer to windows that aren't there anymore and/or changed their name, but you can always add a "2019.4" to your search and try again.

I am not entirely a beginner with Unity, as I worked with it for my PhD projects. Even then, the list of resources I needed to complete my current project so far includes 5 YouTube tutorials, 2 forum threads, and zero links to official documentation. Is this a problem? Is IOSD better than the thick manuals we had before? Am I the only one getting outdated answers for trivial problems? I have no idea. So I propose a compromise: I will point at the situation and give it a name, let someone else answer the hard questions, and we will share the credit.