To be fair, documentation is very often a much longer route to understanding your specific use case. At the same time, SO is responsible for far too much cargo cult programming and I fear ChatGPT will be the same for this.
And there are way too many projects where the documentation is nonexistent or bare to the point of being counterproductive to wade through. I’ve seen way too many open source projects that purport to have documentation but when you open it, it’s just doxygen run over the raw source files with barely any documenting comments in them. If I wanted to see only the names of the classes and functions I’d just pop the source in an IDE, the point of documentation is to point out everything that isn’t immediately obvious just looking at names and to give examples.
“Self-documenting code” is the biggest lie we tell ourselves to get out of writing actual, necessary documentation.
To be fair, documentation is very often a much longer route to understanding your specific use case. At the same time, SO is responsible for far too much cargo cult programming and I fear ChatGPT will be the same for this.
And there are way too many projects where the documentation is nonexistent or bare to the point of being counterproductive to wade through. I’ve seen way too many open source projects that purport to have documentation but when you open it, it’s just doxygen run over the raw source files with barely any documenting comments in them. If I wanted to see only the names of the classes and functions I’d just pop the source in an IDE, the point of documentation is to point out everything that isn’t immediately obvious just looking at names and to give examples.
“Self-documenting code” is the biggest lie we tell ourselves to get out of writing actual, necessary documentation.