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Comment by nynx | Hacker News Reader

I've found that the amount I use stackoverflow is inversely proportional to the quality of the documentation and the strength of the type-system of the language I'm using.

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That's me with Python... For some reason I find the documentation extremely cumbersome to navigate and parse. It's just so wordy and dense. And there are barely any examples - which is what I'm usually looking for instead of having to read a whole paragraph.

The Elixir documentation on the other hand is succinct and always features basic examples for every function. It's a joy to work with.

As a slightly opposing take, Django has the highest-quality and most comprehensive documentation I've ever seen for a web framework... Or open source project, for that matter.

Not very related to the parent comment, but just an interesting note.

I agree, Django docs put Flask to shame! Flask in general is more intuitive I guess, but the docs are not as good as they could be.

I've been playing with the ast module in Python lately, and the documentation actually says to go look at someone else's documentation because it's better, which is a refreshing take.

Official Documentation: https://docs.python.org/3/library/ast.html

Green Tree Snakes: https://greentreesnakes.readthedocs.io/

+1 for Elixir’s documentation. José Valim knew what he was doing when he made docs so easy and pleasant to create and view.

I always love it when a programming language has their docs available off-line and easily accessible. I grew up on Perl without an internet connection (or a GUI for that matter) so I got very used to the perldoc command. That is now the standard I expect. Elixir is one of the few languages that exceeds this bar imo.

Definitely. Looking at my browser history for stackoverflow + PHP, it seems to be things to do with PHP, such as how to prevent a referrer from being sent when users click a link on my website. That's of course not actually part of the PHP language, so it would seem like I'm rarely looking up how to use PHP APIs on stackoverflow. I've always found PHP docs to be the best of any language that I've used.

Though even for PHP StackOverflow is still pretty useful e.g:

https://www.google.com/search?q=string+contains+word+php

Note that php.net answer (official docs) is right below the stack overflow one.

I like the php manual. Its pretty simple and has good exmamples. They seem to used to have allowed/ allowed user comments, which used to be really old. (this one seems more up to date)

It's curious, despite not a example of a great language, PHP has great documentation.

I tried Pharo, and a great functionality there I miss in other languages, is the search by example ability. Saves a lot of visits to stackoverflow. See for example:

https://avdi.codes/in-which-i-make-you-hate-ruby-in-7-minute...

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