Comment on Algorithms instead of source code !!
ninjan@lemmy.mildgrim.com 5 months ago
The answer to this question is the same as for all documentation:
- Because it’s boring to write documentation
- What is obvious and what needs to be explained is often not apparent for the person creating it
- When time is limited then documentation is the first thing to be reduced
- Not enough value is put on good documentation and the associated skill
But in the spirit of FOSS documentation is something that is actually an excellent thing for a person new the project to start contributing to. You need to understand the code anyway to be able to help with bugfixes / feature creation so might as well build reputation by improving on existing documentation by adding clarification and comments and wiki entries that would’ve aided in making it quicker for you to grasp something.
MagicShel@programming.dev 5 months ago
Also, it’s not just that it’s boring, difficult, and undervalued, but also during development the code is constantly changing and to constantly spend 20 minutes updating documentation for a 3 minute change that might or might not solve an issue is horribly wasteful of time. So by the time a project releases, probably 80% of the documentation is outdated already.
The only exception to this I’m familiar with (though I’m sure there are others) is using OpenAPI to generate both source code and documentation from a configuration file. That way your documentation and code are always in sync. But that’s a relatively narrow use case that isn’t going to cover low-level stuff like algorithms.