[ritchiea]

This 10,000 times. And it’s not just Rails, the quality of the Rails documentation made an impact on the Ruby community that was generally replicated. Compare that to the JavaScript world where cornerstone, insanely popular libraries will have documentation that covers roughly 10% of a library’s API surface area and maybe one simple example that doesn’t cover production use cases. And dozens of out of date Medium blogs.

I don’t understand how people operate like this day-to-day either guessing at APIs or having to dig through large, complex open source codebases just to figure out basic library functionality.

Maybe it’s my conception of how things should work that’s off, because I’ve met developers who actually enjoyed guessing at library APIs and said they don’t like reading documentation. I hoped they were the reckless fringe minority. Maybe they are actually the majority?

I worked so much faster in Rails. The community made that possible by writing well about how their libraries were meant to be used. And if anyone’s response is “well you should read your open source dependencies’s code anyway,” many times I did have to jump into the code of Ruby libraries and it was a lot easier to read the codebase when the library APIs were well documented, providing a context for understanding. I miss Ruby and Rails.

[halfmatthalfcat]

I've been doing Javascript for a long time and have rarely run into issues with a lack of documentation. Maybe in projects with like 10 stars on Github ran by a single developer but in all of the major Node projects, you're going to have ample documentation and support for implementing said libraries. Just my take.

[CosmicShadow]

I've found most JS libraries are as the parent described, low coverage, garbage basic examples. Maybe this isn't the case on major huge libraries, but for your every day library, it's like there's a rule where you have to write the worst docs that still look pretty and all there at first glance, but totally useless and frustrating time and time again. The docs usually feel smug in the way they make it seems so easy and then they don't tell you how to do anything useful, like you are the one in the wrong for trying to use it for a real example or that you are an idiot because you can't just infer how everything would work without docs and examples. You have to learn from StackOverflow issues to understand how to actually do anything. That's my view. Maybe in general people just don't remember anything with good docs, and only the bad examples.

I feel like my ambitions for doing anything quickly are destroyed time and time again after finding a library to help me do it easily and fast the docs are the same old garbage. And these are the top starred libraries for their purpose. "How can this common thing to do on JS not have a huge, widely used and well document library that has existed for years?". It still blows my mind how after years and millions of people using it, so many libraries still have the worst docs.

[aledalgrande]

Ever used Sequelize?

[kjsthree]

Haha! That’s the one that immediately came to mind. What a dumpster fire.

[masa331]

My question is why Node docs on nodejs.org don't have search