[Zelphyr]

Too many Open Source developers discount the value of documentation. I all too often hear, "It's Open Source so the community should step up and write the documentation." To which I counter that the best person/people to at least start the documentation are the ones who build the product as they're the most knowledgeable about it. The community will gladly contribute. I personally believe that great documentation was a big reason for PHP's success in the early days.

[pweezy]

> I personally believe that great documentation was a big reason for PHP's success in the early days.

I agree. The culture of user-submitted comments with helpful examples and clarifications on each documentation page was a big part of that, too.

[otterley]

Same for all of the GNU software distribution, Sun Microsystems’ products, and SGI’s. Even MSDN has had pretty good documentation.

I miss the days when I could understand how something worked just by reading the official documentation first.

To this day, in my open source projects, I do not accept contributions that lack either documentation updates or test cases.

[linux2647]

> I miss the days when I could understand how something worked just by reading the official documentation first.

This is probably why I don’t read much documentation when I’m working with a library, et al. Never thought about it until I read the parent

[thirdsun]

Absolutely. Good, detailed, up to date documentation is one of my top priorities when selecting development tools, frameworks and software.