On Fri, 30 Dec 2011, Polytropon wrote:
On Fri, 30 Dec 2011 10:22:31 -0500, David Jackson wrote:
Of course, those best able to document are those who wrote it in
the first place, since they already know how it works.
A fact seems to be: "Modern" programmers don't bother
with documenting, or coding guidelines, or style or
other things that "slow down" development. This
attitude isn't new in general, as it has been done
that way even in IT dinosaur times: There are COBOL
programs still running, and nobody knows _why_ they
are running and _how_. If someone had written usable
documentation at the time the program was created
and maintained, skilled COBOL h4x0rs wouldn't be
able to write the desired salary on the contract
as _they_ wish. :-)
As a [former] mainframer, I might take issue limiting the above to modern. I
learned MVT and then MVS from the microfish and crashing rather larger
(physically) and expensive computers. Not much else was available [outside of
IBM].
But keep in mind: Writing code and writing documentation
are two different things. There are people who are
excellent coders, but bad writers. In some teams,
you'll find code writers and doc writers separated,
but working together. This approach isn't free of
problems, but also seems to work.
In this thread if anyone mentioned Robert Watson, kernel source cross-reference,
I missed it. Also every so often Kirk McKusick teaches a course on BSD
internals. Kind of expensive but very thorough.
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