Moving back to .NET

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 25 September 2015 at 20:01:18 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
> On Friday, 25 September 2015 at 16:15:45 UTC, Laeeth Isharc 
> wrote:
>> Where I think we don't do such a good job is curating such 
>> knowledge and presenting it in a form that's easy to digest 
>> for newcomers.  That's also a function of the kinds of people 
>> that are here, because creative people don't like doing boring 
>> things like write documentation.  (And they have other 
>> higher-valued demands on their time).  I don't know what the 
>> answer is, but we will have to find one over time.
>
> BTW I don't get the documentation problem. I often catch myself 
> admiring my code, yeah I do a good job writing it, and by 
> writing docs I give it credit for its beauty, I brag about 
> great job I did. Like... "look there was this problem and I 
> solved it in the most elegant way possible, see how:... and it 
> does this and that because it's the best thing to do here, and 
> it doesn't do that because it's not good to do it here, and it 
> has this little feature that makes it better than without it 
> and is really helpful". So it feels like people don't want to 
> write docs because they think they wrote a crappy code and 
> hence can't give it credit, they are ashamed to speak about it.

A lot of folks write code because they want to get something done 
and simply because they like coding. Publicizing it isn't 
necessarily particularly important to them. They may want to make 
it open source so that others can use it if they're so inclined, 
but that's frequently not the goal. And even when they _do_ want 
to make a big deal out of something, coding is a lot more 
interesting than writing documentation, and there's always more 
code to write, so it can be pretty easy to leave documentation by 
the wayside. Most programmers consider documentation to be a 
chore, even when they're really excited about what they did. In 
general, I wouldn't expect someone to even open source something 
if the problem was that they were ashamed about how they did it. 
I fully expect that in the vast majority of cases when code is 
available but not well documented, it's because the programmer 
didn't have the time to do it or didn't want to spend the time 
doing it. This is the first time that I've ever heard anyone 
suggest that it was due to shame about the code.

- Jonathan M Davis