| Two pieces of software I’ve had to work with for the last five years are matlab and labview. Say what you will about matlab, I think the documentation is the best I’ve seen anywhere. The labview documentation is some of the worst I’ve seen. I’ll generally forgive an open source project for poor docs, because I can read the code(and it’s free, so how much can I really complain??) Closed source that costs thousands? You better have have your docs tight. That said, labview docs are worse than many open source projects. Most of it boils down to useless tautological statements like “X: the input variable x” Three things that make the matlab docs so much better: 1. A plethora of examples, in the same page as the function doc. Labview makes you open a special program (no, it’s not available via a web search) and search for an example. The search function sucks. 2. Web searches for matlab docs return the doc for the latest version. Almost always with labview, you get something from like 2012. 3. A real discussion of the algorithm being implemented, with real references. I can’t recall ever seeing a citation in a labview doc. So there’s some impressions, from a users point of view:) |