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by erinan 1890 days ago
That's me with Python... For some reason I find the documentation extremely cumbersome to navigate and parse. It's just so wordy and dense. And there are barely any examples - which is what I'm usually looking for instead of having to read a whole paragraph.

The Elixir documentation on the other hand is succinct and always features basic examples for every function. It's a joy to work with.

3 comments

As a slightly opposing take, Django has the highest-quality and most comprehensive documentation I've ever seen for a web framework... Or open source project, for that matter.

Not very related to the parent comment, but just an interesting note.

I agree, Django docs put Flask to shame! Flask in general is more intuitive I guess, but the docs are not as good as they could be.
+1 for Elixir’s documentation. José Valim knew what he was doing when he made docs so easy and pleasant to create and view.

I always love it when a programming language has their docs available off-line and easily accessible. I grew up on Perl without an internet connection (or a GUI for that matter) so I got very used to the perldoc command. That is now the standard I expect. Elixir is one of the few languages that exceeds this bar imo.

I've been playing with the ast module in Python lately, and the documentation actually says to go look at someone else's documentation because it's better, which is a refreshing take.

Official Documentation: https://docs.python.org/3/library/ast.html

Green Tree Snakes: https://greentreesnakes.readthedocs.io/