4 ms·

It will be interesting to see if Microsoft's behavior changes. I suspect it will get worse now that oversight is gone. Ballmer's the kind of guy who would want

It will be interesting to see if Microsoft's behavior changes. I suspect it will get worse now that oversight is gone. Ballmer's the kind of guy who would want to take the lead in shady PR back from Facebook. Perhaps I will be surprised, though.

kevin_morrill 15y ago
Unlikely. The company is still under intense scrutiny from the EU to publish API documentation. It's actually kind of sad, because the company burns thousands of man years writing API docs for things no one actually uses. It's certainly not the only reason, but it's another factor in why they ship so infrequently.
- rbanffy 15y ago
  It's not ridiculously hard to generate automatic documentation from comments. A healthy side-effect would be that the quality of the code would increase and precisely match the quality of the documentation. If the documentation is lacking, incomplete or wrong, you go and fix the comments in the source code and regenerate the docs. If a programmer told you that if skipping documenting the source code would allow it to be delivered sooner, would you buy it? What's next? Skipping tests? In my projects my team routinely generates not only API documentation, but also unit-tests from comments. This way, if the docs are wrong, the tests fail.
  - kenjackson 15y ago
    API documentation isn't the issue. MS has that covered easy. Rather its protocols. And the EU standard is a fair bit higher than say the C standard, because there is no such thing as undefined behavior. MS must specify what happens in all conditions on all potential configurations of all their systems. I need to look it up but I think its like 50K plus pages of non API docs.
- code_duck 15y ago
  Don't they at least have documentation for people who are expected to use these APIs internally? How could they not? And why would that info not be suitable for public release after minor redaction?

kevin_morrill 15y ago

Unlikely. The company is still under intense scrutiny from the EU to publish API documentation. It's actually kind of sad, because the company burns thousands of man years writing API docs for things no one actually uses. It's certainly not the only reason, but it's another factor in why they ship so infrequently.

rbanffy 15y ago
It's not ridiculously hard to generate automatic documentation from comments. A healthy side-effect would be that the quality of the code would increase and precisely match the quality of the documentation. If the documentation is lacking, incomplete or wrong, you go and fix the comments in the source code and regenerate the docs. If a programmer told you that if skipping documenting the source code would allow it to be delivered sooner, would you buy it? What's next? Skipping tests? In my projects my team routinely generates not only API documentation, but also unit-tests from comments. This way, if the docs are wrong, the tests fail.
- kenjackson 15y ago
  API documentation isn't the issue. MS has that covered easy. Rather its protocols. And the EU standard is a fair bit higher than say the C standard, because there is no such thing as undefined behavior. MS must specify what happens in all conditions on all potential configurations of all their systems. I need to look it up but I think its like 50K plus pages of non API docs.
code_duck 15y ago
Don't they at least have documentation for people who are expected to use these APIs internally? How could they not? And why would that info not be suitable for public release after minor redaction?