[hinkley]

I've found that in general the longer someone has been on a project, the worse their documentation is.

People who have both deep practical knowledge of a domain and can explain it clearly are so rare that we tend to remember them by name. Experts can bitch all they want about how Neil deGrasse Tyson isn't a 'real astrophysicist', but lets see you try to talk to the general public, or for that matter, college students starting their senior year as undergrads in your field. Then lets have them frankly rate you on your lack of accessibility, tendency to circular reasoning, overuse of jargon, and complete lack of patience... We'll call it the head-up-own-ass quotient.

Erlang is a very, very old project, with a historically high degree of echo chamber going on. Without active pushback from a dedicated member of the core team, such things usually end in utter chaos. It is less likely that you will achieve understanding by reading documentation of that sort, than that you will accidentally summon an eldritch horror by reading it aloud and not being very precise with your pronunciation.

[cambalache]

> Experts can bitch all they want about how Neil deGrasse Tyson isn't a 'real astrophysicist', but lets see you try to talk to the general public, or for that matter, college students starting their senior year as undergrads in your field.

You mean like Feynman, Hawking, Penrose, Brian Green, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Freeman Dyson, Edward Frenkel and so on?

I agree that it is not a sin to be "just" a science popularizer _a la_ Asimov and people who hold that belief are just being obtuse. Equally obtuse are the people who think "Those scientists cannot communicate with the common man", well guess what, that skill is distributed almost randomly among that lot, so for every scientist with an opaque style there is a wonderful communicator. The same happen in IT/CS and in any other field.

[jacquesm]

> Without active pushback from a dedicated member of the core team, such things usually end in utter chaos.

That may well be true, but Erlang is actually the opposite of utter chaos, it is extremely well designed, organized and implemented and battle hardened to a degree that would put most FOSS projects to shame.

[whelming_wave]

My reading was that they were saying the documentation would end in utter chaos, not the project as a whole.

[jacquesm]

Erlangs documentation is fine. It's not 'modern', but it is actually quite good. There is a lot of it though and it isn't newbie friendly, which is a niche filled by some excellent books out there, for instance the (free!) Learn You Some Erlang website/book: https://learnyousomeerlang.com/

[hinkley]

I find it frustrating how often on Hackernews people jump into the middle of a conversation as if the beginning of the conversation never happened.

From the top level comment:

> To be blunt, I really dreaded needing to jump to the Erlang documentation,