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Ask HN: Does documentation for programming languages matter anymore?

by Gtex555 on 4/1/25, 6:52 PM with 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?

  • by billconan on 4/1/25, 6:59 PM

    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?

  • by JohnFen on 4/1/25, 7:04 PM

    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.

  • by creer on 4/1/25, 8:31 PM

    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.)