Nobody uses it because nobody knows it exists

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Nobody uses it because nobody knows it exists

By Martin English | January 31, 2007

If It Isn’t Documented, It Doesn’t Exist refers specifically to making javascript libraries easy to use, to facilitate their uptake. Documentation can make or break your use of a product or tool, and make the difference between getting something going today (because you have an example inf ront of you), and not providing the functionality at all (because you can’t see how its possible).

There’s plenty of good comments in the discussion, but I’ve extracted two of the gems that are buried way down the page :

If you’re building a library for other developers to use, the “Product” is a combination of the code and documentation. Thus for each release of the product, you’d have an equivalent and up to date release of the documentation.

and

Ship your tests with your API. Unit tests are a great way of providing how-to documentation, and they are self-correcting when they get out of sync with the API. This may not be complete (tests may explain how, but not WHY), but it is a heck of a start.

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