The Open Source Survey asked a broad array of questions. One that caught my eye was about problems people encounter when working with, or contributing to, open source projects. An incredible 93 percent of people reported being frustrated with “incomplete or confusing documentation”.
That’s hardly a surprise. There are a lot of projects on Github with the sparsest of descriptions, and scant instruction on how to use them. If you aren’t clever enough to figure it out for yourself, tough.
[...] According to the Github Open Source Survey, 60 percent of contributors rarely or never contribute to documentation. And that’s fine.
Documenting software is extremely difficult. People go to university to learn to become technical writers, spending thousands of dollars, and several years of their life. It’s not really reasonable to expect every developer to know how to do it, and do it well.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday June 06 2017, @02:55PM
It's kind of weird -- auto-parentheses seem natural to me in Eclipse, but when I enabled a mode in emacs to do it, it drove me nuts for a couple days until I turned it off again. Maybe it's a C++ vs Java thing, or a workflow difference...
It's too bad code tags in emacs (the equivalent of F3 in Eclipse) look like such a mess. This being a Linux tool, of course there are 3 or 4 different ways to do it.
Wow. Sorry :-/
Kind of like how the search in Windows is so dysfunctional sometimes I can search for the name of a file in the same directory and it won't find it. So rather than even try, I just fire up Cygwin these days.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"