Ask HN: Does documentation for programming languages matter anymore?

2 points by Gtex555 1 year ago | 3 comments

So does documentation for programming languages matter anymore (at a the lower levels)? Sure if a programming language has better documentation the LLM can understand it better and give better suggestions but on a personal level if I'm learning a language any decent LLM should be enough right?

billconan 1 year ago |

I don't think the purpose of documentation is to explain the what, but the why.

As an example, in a device driver project, we need to send no-ops to the hardware to slow it down, in order to alleviate a hardware overheating issue.

Can AI or even human realize the reason by looking at no-ops?

JohnFen 1 year ago |

I think documentation remains essential. Ignoring issues about the quality of LLM responses, the conversational nature of using them doesn't lend itself well to some of the needs that documenation fills.

creer 1 year ago |

I don't understand, (eventually) you can read the documentation yourself or you can chat with a bot / agent that has read the documentation. Either way, not much happens if there is no documentation, no? (Never mind, that launching with minimal documentation is still a thing even for giant projects... - and a good reason to drop them as soon as we notice.)