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Comment by grepular | Hacker News Reader

I've always found crate documentation to be the worse thing about Rust. Because it auto-generates some documentation, people just assume that's good enough, and you end up with tonnes of crates that seemingly only have a list of functions and structs and what arguments they take, but very little information about how you're supposed to plug everything together.

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At least you get that. In the (untyped) Python ecosystem, you're lucky to get "this parameter is a file-like object" even though "file-like" doesn't tell you if it just supports read() and write() or also seek() or close() or truncate(). You have to dig into the source code, which likely just passes the parameter into another function which passes it into another and then across a library boundary and so on. And again, that's the best-case scenario. Just having correct type information is 80% of the battle IMHO.

> people just assume that's good enough

really? I've found that in general the same number of people bother to go deep into explaining compared to e.g. JS, and always having rustdoc for the people that don't is far better than reading the source or TypeScript definitions.

Both are true, in my experience. Lots of good documentation for some crates, while others (usually with fewer maintainers or less intention of reuse) just have the autogenerated index.

Go is the same. Everyone, including the stdlib maintainers seem to think a few lines of comments per method is the same as documentation on how to use the package, best practices, pitfalls, etc.

Java is the same as well

So tldr: people don't like writing documentation, and it's hard to make them care.

If you can’t tell a story with text, you won’t be able to tell it with code either. The thing that makes people want better documentation is the same thing that makes it difficult to get.

I remember years ago using Ant as a build tool and the only way I figured it out was to Googlestalk the author. Given enough answers to questions in enough places I finally developed a theory of the system. It was still supremely weird to convince it to do certain things but at least I was able to.

> If you can’t tell a story with text, you won’t be able to tell it with code either.

I couldn't disagree more. Telling a story with words to humans and telling a story with code to a computer are completely different things.

You’re not telling a story to a computer. You’re telling it to your coworkers. The people’s code that’s most frustrating to work with share your philosophy. They are often so convinced they’re right that they can’t even hear constructive criticism. That’s not my opinion, that’s the consensus view shared over lunches and coffees with their coworkers, across many jobs.

Interestingly, documentation that's only type signatures is also a frequent gripe I've heard about OCaml. So maybe this is a universal phenomenon.

However, some people contrast OCaml and Rust in this regard, contradicting the views of the great grand-parent comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25111104

Rust's stdlib does have a policy of having a runnable code example for every API.

This is the part that blew my mind. For simple functions ("how do I read from a buffer again?"), the code example is more useful than any number of paragraphs of description, especially because its correctness is enforced by the compiler. Switching to learning Node after Rust has been a major step backwards and involves a lot more time on Stack Overflow.

(Unrelated gripe: if I could ban w3schools from my search results, that would be great.)

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