Quotes of the week

[Posted September 25, 2013 by n8willis]

Dear Internet: task-switching != multitasking. Don't say you need the latter if you mean the first.

It seems too many programmers see documentation as unpleasant red tape they want to cut through as quickly as possible, instead of an opportunity to communicate with their *users*. To the contrary: users should be the most important people in the world if you're writing code that's worth documenting at all.

— Guido van Rossum

Quotes of the week

Posted Sep 26, 2013 13:41 UTC (Thu) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link]

Surprising to see how many people disagree with Attila. Especially noteworthy is how strong the emotions are.

Quotes of the week

Posted Sep 26, 2013 14:20 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (1 responses)

I find that writing code is usually either trivial or interesting, but writing good-quality documentation of the kind I like to read tends to be both boring and non-trivial.

Quotes of the week

Posted Sep 29, 2013 10:32 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I think it's fun -- not because it means I'm communicating with users, though I am, but because it means I'm *teaching* them, and for the first time, no less -- and that means my own design will come clearer in my head and I'll often find bugs and design flaws while I'm documenting. (Design docs can do some of this, but they're never as detailed as good end-user-targetted documentation.)

(I tend to write documentation before code for exactly that reason: it saves time writing code that later turns out to be broken by design.)