Though maybe written tongue-in-cheek, this Python Makes Me Nervous article has some excellent points.

Because of duck-typing, you should rigorously document how methods should be called (try epytext and its fields).

Most open source Python projects do the exact opposite

Even Python standard library is poorly documented and sets a very bad example (missing manual ???)

Thus, programming in Python becomes nightmare of grepping through source code (the implementation) or stepping into it in pdb just to figure out how APIs should work (Plone/Zope, anyone?)

Should Python community stop in some point to focus on delivering better documentation instead of focusing on new features and goodies (like the syntax moratorium which was recently lifted)?

﻿﻿From my personal experience

The best, and the only, person to document the code adequately is the person how originally wrote it

Because the author already knows how to use the code he doesn’t need to care about the fact how to enable the code for other users. Many libraries and projects are driven by “scratching your own need” mentality, not by “let’s make this a happy community” mentality. The exception is something like Facebook or Google whose sole purpose is to attract new users their platform bringing in new €€€.

If you are developing a framework or community project make the documentation a requirement for deliverable and stick with it. If you let one person to skip one hour of writing documentation you are making 10 persons spending one hour figuring out how to use the damn thing.

Doctests are not documentation. They are tests. They are extremely unreadable way to say “how I should use this thing”, because doctests are often executed in the context of test stubs which do not reflect connections to the other parts of the framework or real contexts.

“Buy a book – it tells you everything” business model is not feasible in long run. Books get old. Books are not searchable. People don’t buy books.

The good documentation is a way to differentiate, and win, in the situation where there are competing frameworks. I believe the success of Django was mostly driven by its good documentation.

This points could be applied to other duck-typed, open source driven programming languages (PHP anyone?). With good documentation we can reduce the need of Valium recipes for everyone of us.

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