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Not because of Programmers who think that the time spent writing documentation would be better spent programming some more? ;)



No reason it couldn't be both, I suppose.


Definitely the case in my office. A couple of opinionated and (relatively) senior devs that think the code is the documentation. No, I can't read this 40 yo fortran code and use it as the basis for a new program on a different architecture. It uses gotos and variables like "yxtgn" that mean nothing to the reader (turned out y meant it was an integer, weird). I spent a month on that because there was no documentation, which took up a page once I was done writing it after my reverse engineering effort.

And then documentation, where it exists, is often poorly CM'd word documents, and poorly OCR'd PDFs (or doc->pdf that somehow lost the ability to be searchable and selectable text, what option did they select?!?).

The offending systems are only maintainable because a few people haven't retired (< 1 year left for several of them) and sheer force of will for the rest of us.


> It uses gotos and variables like "yxtgn" that mean nothing to the reader (turned out y meant it was an integer, weird)

It meant "ynteger". Elementary, my dear Watson.




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