Hacker News Reader

Comment by d0vs | Hacker News Reader

It baffles me that all those JS physics library never provide proper docs or even an API reference and always link to the C++ Box2D manual as if it was an acceptable alternative. Always have to guess what the JS equivalent is but even then you're in for a surprise: https://github.com/shakiba/planck.js/blob/master/CHANGES.md

View on HN

I'm guessing it comes down to "writing docs takes lots of time, and when you're a lean operation priority goes to making stuff work."

I'm sure once the project matures it'll get a documentation pass, but the project is quite young.

As a dev of an unrelated lib who cares about making good documentation this is a really valuable comment; I'm guilty of doing this partially for example in https://github.com/franciscop/drive-db where I link to MongoDB platform for the more advanced selectors.

In my experience good documentation takes around 3x-5x of the time of writing the code (excluding tests and tutorials), so while I hate seeing libraries without a decent documentation I totally understand it.

Edit: also it is in alpha, where writing documentation many times backfires you and you have to remove large pieces of it wasting your time.

I've found writing documentation and trying to explain to others why the API is the way it is frequently makes me completely reconsider and redesign the API to be better. So no, you really should start on documentation right away, because what you're calling "waste" right now is a feature.

That is interesting, I think the way I do it is quite similar: normally I write the examples that would go in the documentation first then work around it, but I don't write the whole text+proofreading which is what takes most of the time for me.

Edit: see this "others" folder for example: https://github.com/franciscop/server/tree/master/others

That does help, but I've found that getting people to try using your API does an even better job of informing you about your design decisions.

Last time I was building a novel API, I opted to provide commented example code for documentation, recruited several members of the intended audience to try out the API, and just offered to answer questions directly. I wrote out actual documentation in preparation for the "official 1.0 release."

At some point it comes down to choosing how to spend your limited time. Writing documentation isn't going to be a "waste," but it's probably not high ROI because your early adopters are likely familiar with the problem domain anyway.

Oh cmon I never ever said writing documentation is a waste!

What I mean is that writing the final documentation with all that implies before you even know what the API is going to look like is a waste. Though I agree with the parent, stubbing some docs to get a better feeling of what the docs look like is valuable.

Those are changes to internals, there are only few API differences which are explained on readme page. Anyway, I agree with you, a new API doc would be very helpful.

On one hand, I agree with you that linking to the documentation of another library, in another language, isn't very helpful. On the other hand, it's an open-source project. It has to start somewhere, and referencing the original docs is better than nothing. If you've looked at a variety of libraries along these lines and found them lacking, perhaps you're an ideal person to contribute better docs to this project.

For me, an example is worth 10 pages of documentation. The documentation is good for reference but only after you understand the ideas behind it.

One of the biggest criteria I have for using a library is whether they have a rich set of examples to draw from.

Conversely, after the initial struggle getting the ideas behind it, examples are worthless and documentation is king.

Sometimes. Examples are good at giving concrete working code to use as a basis but they only express a few ideas. Documentation will let you understand the different pieces so you can build what you like.

Both are beneficial for different scenarios. I find I use examples much more often but when examples fail, documentation is necessary.

Good documentation has tons of examples! For me the gold documentation is jQuery. When I didn't know enough JS the beginning was cryptical but the examples below made it, when I was experienced I could just read the beginning for the footprint.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com