3 ms·
> The information is only hidden with colorless methods if you consider the documentation to be a place to hide information (o^o) That's exactly the mindset of
by Joker_vD 2y ago
> The information is only hidden with colorless methods if you consider the documentation to be a place to hide information (o^o)
That's exactly the mindset of quite a number of programmers nowadays, sadly. Two anecdotes: First, there was a blog post (probably even featured on HN) about problems in the design of the API of... Python's requests library, I think? It was quite a bizarre reading, complaints made almost no sense to me until I got to about the middle of the article when it clicked: the author was trying to figure out how to use the API by just reading the names of the classes, methods, and parameter names and making guesses as how it all would connect together instead of, you know, reading the docs. Which do exist, by the way.
The second example happened just yesterday at my job. In the essence, some fellow programmer added a call to function foo() which he thought would do some particular thing and return a particular answer while in reality it did not quite do that, and the return value is essentially meaningless (the function basically always returns "yep, I've scheduled do_foo() to run asynchronously some time soon"). Now, this foo() dunction is not documented, and if you read it's source (3 lines of code), it's quite obvious that its return value is useless... so why did they think it works the way they wanted it to work? When asked about it, the answer was "Well, it's named foo(), so I just thought that's what it would do". Sadly, calling strange third-party functions and hoping them to work they way you'd like them to work is no basis for writing the working programs.
- _ea1k 2y agoAnd of course, these developers will also complain that the project lacks documentation. Often this is the case for projects that are actually well documented, its just that the dev didn't read it.
- resonious 2y agoWas also going to say this. I've seen so many people fumble around figuring something else, then write a doc for how to do it, just to find that someone else wrote effectively the exact same doc 5 months ago.