Ask HN: Which programming language has the best documentation?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2870879

by zoowar • 15 years ago

6 12 15 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Recently I was playing around with Scala/Lift and found the online documentation horrible. It was mostly auto generated function specifications with very little background information. Which programming language has the best documentation?

zoowar3• 15 years ago

I like both python http://docs.python.org/modindex.html and golang http://golang.org/pkg/ best.

harold• 15 years ago

also the PEPs for Python: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/

TMK• 15 years ago

C ISO/IEC 9899 - 1999 Standard is my favourite piece of documentation.

spacemanaki• 15 years ago

The Java standard library docs are very good, and the language spec is quite clear and precisely defined.

Another language with brutally specific docs is Common Lisp. Even though I have really only dabbled in it, the Hyperspec is really pretty impressive.

At least one common factor between them is Guy Steele, I don't think that's a coincidence.

Edited to add that I'm pretty sure my comment was motivated by this comment by mahmud: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1661254

colanderman2• 15 years ago

I remember reading that Guy Steele was specifically hired to the Java project for this reason. Wikipedia corroborates this: "In 1994, Steele joined Sun Microsystems and was invited by Bill Joy to become a member of the Java team after the language had been designed, since he had a track record of writing good specifications for existing languages."

He also documented ECMAScript 1, which I've found to be pleasurably precise.

zoowar3• 15 years ago

In addition to documentation, I find a language specification useful. Golang has an excellent one http://golang.org/doc/go_spec.html My original Stroustrup C++book included a language specification which was nice.

brudgers• 15 years ago

It depends on how narrowly one defines "documentation" and what one means by "best."

I.e. there's probably a book on Visual Basic that's a good fit for just about anyone's level of interest and programming experience...assuming of course that one has an interest in Visual Basic.

On the other hand, K&R is a concise and well written.

Yet one has an inexhaustible supply of JavaScript examples only an F12 away.

zoowar3• 15 years ago

When you answer, you get to define the scope.

colanderman2• 15 years ago

I'm going to vote twice:

1) ECMAScript, for being excrutiatingly detailed. Guy Steele did a wonderful job shoehorning an unambiguous specification around a loopy language. 2) PostgreSQL. While not particularly mathematical, Postgres docs do a good job of "covering all the bases"... potential "gotchas" and incompatibilities are always documented, and I never find myself wondering what a particular feature does.

mikeburrelljr• 15 years ago

PHP via http://php.net/function

VicT11• 15 years ago

In my experience I've been trying to learn beginner programming with Ruby on Rails. I feel like there are tons of high quality resources for Python that I come across. Ruby on rails documentation seems pretty good. Ruby documentation though has been tough to find.

samth• 15 years ago

The Racket Guide [1] and Reference [2] are very nice (and almost all the work of just one person, Matthew Flatt).

[1] http://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/ [2] http://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/

Ask HN: Which programming language has the best documentation?

Related Stories