Laws of developers documentation
Monday, August 2nd, 2004
During my programming years, I’ve noticed that Developers documentation adhears to a couple of laws:
- If you write documentation, they don’t read it.
- If you don’t write documentation, they complain about it.
- If you update documentation regularly, they don’t.
- If you don’t update documentation, they complain about it.
- If you read other people’s documentation and you follow it, it is out of date and they complain about it.
- If you don’t read other people’s documentation, they’ll complain about it even though the documentation was out of date and wouldn’t have helped anyway.
These laws are unescapable. I’m sorry.