Comment by DannyBee

Only in a world where features are made without thought. Documentation is not just for your users. Writing the development documentation helps you make better features in the first place.

The zig users on this thread seem to not understand this, and all seem to think documentation is a thing you write later for users when everything settles down. Or is somehow otherwise "in the way" of feature and API development speed.

That is a very strange view.

If writing developer documentation is having serious affect on your language feature velocity, you are doing something very wrong. Instead, writing it should make things move faster, becuase, at a minimum, others understand what you are trying to do, how it is going to work, and can help. Also, it helps you think through it yourself and whether what you are writing makes any sense, etc.

Yes there are people who can do this all without documentation, but there are 100x as many who can't, but will still give high quality contributions that will move you along faster if you enable them to help you. Throwing out the ability to have these folks help you is, at a minimum, self-defeating.

I learned this the hard way, because i'm one of those folks who can just stare at random undocumented messy code and know what it actually does, what the author was probably trying to do, etc, and it took years till i learned most people were not like this.