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Too many Open Source developers discount the value of documentation. I all too often hear, "It's Open Source so the community should step up and write the docu
by Zelphyr 7y ago
Too many Open Source developers discount the value of documentation. I all too often hear, "It's Open Source so the community should step up and write the documentation." To which I counter that the best person/people to at least start the documentation are the ones who build the product as they're the most knowledgeable about it. The community will gladly contribute. I personally believe that great documentation was a big reason for PHP's success in the early days.
- pweezy 7y ago> I personally believe that great documentation was a big reason for PHP's success in the early days. I agree. The culture of user-submitted comments with helpful examples and clarifications on each documentation page was a big part of that, too.
- otterley 7y agoSame for all of the GNU software distribution, Sun Microsystems’ products, and SGI’s. Even MSDN has had pretty good documentation. I miss the days when I could understand how something worked just by reading the official documentation first. To this day, in my open source projects, I do not accept contributions that lack either documentation updates or test cases.
- linux2647 7y ago> I miss the days when I could understand how something worked just by reading the official documentation first. This is probably why I don’t read much documentation when I’m working with a library, et al. Never thought about it until I read the parent
- thirdsun 7y agoAbsolutely. Good, detailed, up to date documentation is one of my top priorities when selecting development tools, frameworks and software.