On Friday, 25 September 2015 at 20:01:18 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
On Friday, 25 September 2015 at 16:15:45 UTC, Laeeth Isharc
wrote:
Where I think we don't do such a good job is curating such
knowledge and presenting it in a form that's easy to digest
for newcomers. That's also a function of the kinds of people
that are here, because creative people don't like doing boring
things like write documentation. (And they have other
higher-valued demands on their time). I don't know what the
answer is, but we will have to find one over time.
BTW I don't get the documentation problem. I often catch myself
admiring my code, yeah I do a good job writing it, and by
writing docs I give it credit for its beauty, I brag about
great job I did. Like... "look there was this problem and I
solved it in the most elegant way possible, see how:... and it
does this and that because it's the best thing to do here, and
it doesn't do that because it's not good to do it here, and it
has this little feature that makes it better than without it
and is really helpful". So it feels like people don't want to
write docs because they think they wrote a crappy code and
hence can't give it credit, they are ashamed to speak about it.
A lot of folks write code because they want to get something done
and simply because they like coding. Publicizing it isn't
necessarily particularly important to them. They may want to make
it open source so that others can use it if they're so inclined,
but that's frequently not the goal. And even when they _do_ want
to make a big deal out of something, coding is a lot more
interesting than writing documentation, and there's always more
code to write, so it can be pretty easy to leave documentation by
the wayside. Most programmers consider documentation to be a
chore, even when they're really excited about what they did. In
general, I wouldn't expect someone to even open source something
if the problem was that they were ashamed about how they did it.
I fully expect that in the vast majority of cases when code is
available but not well documented, it's because the programmer
didn't have the time to do it or didn't want to spend the time
doing it. This is the first time that I've ever heard anyone
suggest that it was due to shame about the code.
- Jonathan M Davis
