In my experience, the docs are fine and mostly better than a random SO answer. A reason many people use it is because they're lazy or want to get past their hurdle with a quick answer rather than understanding things beyond their current issue.<p>Any time I run into one of these, I'll post a reference to the actual docs as a comment in the top/accepted answer.
Sadly the docs are error messages are not seen as part of the product and something that is needed to make something complete. Shipping fast and constantly adding new features has pushed good documentation to the backseat. It’s something that’s nice to have, but almost no one prioritizes, so it never gets done.<p>From what I’ve seen, it is also something that comes with a mature team, as some stability is needed before a team starts to talk about documentation and standards. The constant churn of teams hurts documentation and error messages a lot. Why bother documenting or writing good errors if you won’t be around in 2 years to deal with it? More people need to stick around long enough to feel the pain of their bad decisions and laziness.
If you can search it in the docs, you already know the question well enough to answer. Stackoverflow has answers for people who still misunderstand the topic. That is why documentation is usually useless for beginners.<p>Documentation for pros by pros, often even with topic specific language. Thus useless for beginners.<p>Stackoverflow is concept error filter feeding.<p>Search -> Do you actually mean -> better Wikipedia -> duplicate of actual answer using specialist prose.
Mostly yes, there are exceptions. I thought Django and express.js were both well documented.<p>Baseline code also seems to be well documented as a rule. However modules in a lot of languages, even important widely used modules are too often very poorly documented.