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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[–] hornywarthogfart@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Like all things in life there is balance that must be maintained. A language with few features but super detailed documentation is ultimately going to be less useful than a language with more features but not as strong documentation.

Obviously you want perfect documentation and full features but it just isn't realistic so you have to balance things to your requirements. So I went with 5 because the balance between language features and documentation is going to change based on requirements.