On Saturday, 26 September 2015 at 00:28:19 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
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
And don't forget that there are also the unit tests. Once they
are written they are documentation + example in one. I often find
myself looking at the unit tests in Phobos to see how things
work, when in doubt.
