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I down voted because although I think what you are saying is common parlance, it is really, really bad advice and mixes up causality. Projects which both do the
by garmaine 8y ago
I down voted because although I think what you are saying is common parlance, it is really, really bad advice and mixes up causality. Projects which both do their job and are this well documented attract developers, both to maintain and reuse. Look, for example, at everything done by Armin Ronacher, or at SQLite.
And writing documentation only seems like a waste of time to the developer who just finished writing the code. It wastes their time. But spending time now to write good documentation saves the organization as a whole much more of other developer's time in the long run. It's a smart investment to make, even when the collateral damage is time wasted documenting code that really is thrown out.
(But, if you actually document the code well you'll find out that you throw things out much less often.)
- ozim 8y agoI don't think downvoting is good way for showing disagreement. I disagree with what you wrote. It does not waste developers time, it wastes money of business owners. Developers are usually paid for their time even if they are reading HN instead of working. Now question is to people who pay money if they want to pay for "something in the future maybe will be useful". They will say hell no! They want time to market to be as short as possible and as much of end user value delivered. Now you take example of SQLite or Armin Ronacher those are exceptions. There is a lot more software that is not anything done by Armin and is not SQLite.
- garmaine 8y agoBad advice should be kept highly visible.
- garmaine 8y agoEr, "should not".
- bmh100 8y agoThis is why the business is usually not asked to make engineering decisions. Things like backups, disaster recovery, and redundancy could all be described as "something in the future maybe will be useful".