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Ask HN: Does documentation for programming languages matter anymore?

2 pointsby Gtex555about 2 months ago
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?

3 comments

billconanabout 2 months ago
I don&#x27;t think the purpose of documentation is to explain the what, but the why.<p>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.<p>Can AI or even human realize the reason by looking at no-ops?
JohnFenabout 2 months ago
I think documentation remains essential. Ignoring issues about the quality of LLM responses, the conversational nature of using them doesn&#x27;t lend itself well to some of the needs that documenation fills.
creerabout 2 months ago
I don&#x27;t understand, (eventually) you can read the documentation yourself or you can chat with a bot &#x2F; 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.)