this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2025
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Programming

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Which is more important to you in a language, feature richness or documentation quality? (self.programming)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by Sunsofold to c/programming@programming.dev
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After seeing this post I just thought it would be an interesting discussion. Obvious limits apply of 'you have to have at least some documentation,' so I'm not talking about something where there is none, and the feature set minimum would be less a question of whether you could complete X arbitrary project and more 'does the feature set make it easy to do everything?' You could essentially write everything in assembly, but would you want to?

On an arbitrary 1-10 scale, (1 being 'I'll build the features from nothing as long as the docs are good' and 10 being 'Who needs documentation? I'll happily read through the undocumented code until I find the ones that make magic happen.') where do your preferences lie?

Oh, and integers only. You can be nuanced in your ideas but no 5.5s allowed.

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[–] TehPers@beehaw.org 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

For programming languages? I don't need many features as long as what exists is enough to do everything I need. In fact, the less, the better (or you end up with C++'s regex/Python's urllibN/etc).

I guess that means that I'd end up more on the documentation side, though my reason isn't because I want the most documented language of all time, but because I want the fewest built-in features.

This is why I mostly write Rust when given the option. I write a lot of Python, but I hate the standard library so much. There's the urllib stuff, plus there's a bunch of deprecated stuff in the base64 module, plus I can't stand Python's implementation of async (coroutines are cool but asyncio is miserable to use imo).

Edit: Oh, and nobody's giving integers only when nuanced answers are more interesting to discuss.