this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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(joke in the title stolen from a redditor)

Context: some Rust kid vandalized cppreference.com today.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, but the shittiness of a shitty community will come through in documentation that talks down to you and doesn't dain to explain things properly. And then when you go and ask a question because it wasn't well explained in the documentation and get derided for asking.

Fanboys are also likely to mislead (including in documentation) by downplaying caveats in libraries and such. Documentation can end up being more like marketing speak than technical reference.

You speak of "vocal minorities", but I don't think it's quite as simple as that. Languages have cultures around them. (As do lots of other things. Video games. Hardware devices. Car brands. What have you.) If a language has a toxic community around it, it might be an indication that the people behind the language may lack the ability or motivation to maintain a better community. Or worse, that they're doing things that promote or attract the shittiness.

So, in short, I disagree with you. For one thing "everything about this language is great except its community is shitty" makes me suspicious that maybe everything about the language isn't great and it has a really fanboyish community that likes to suppress any (even legitimate) negativity. Where I have to, I use the language I have to use, but when I have a choice, a shitty community is generally a deal breaker for me.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Rust documentation, at least for std is some of the best I have seen.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Gotcha. I can't really speak to the quality of any Rust official documentation.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Whats also nice is thst you put the documentation in the code and rust automatically generates a documentation page thsts hosted on docs.rs. So it makes really easy to have good docs for your stuff. If only everyone would document their stuff perfectly. A lot of the new released stuff gets released with minimal documentation.