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Comment by hariwb | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for writing this. I have similar gripes about FastAPI having developed an application over the past few years; I'm also continually surprised at how prevalent the attitude is that FastAPI has excellent docs, given how divorced the tutorial / toy examples in the docs are from real-world development and measurement of an API.

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I am really disappointed at the new generation of Python frameworks' documentation, which seem to have the same "docs are tutorials + chatty blog posts which imprecisely describe the APIs" attitude of Javascript libs.

Two words: API Reference.

Have the clinical explanation of methods exposed, with actual breakdowns of what method parameters do. List them all, don't surround it by prose. List out the options! Don't make me dive into the source to find out what I can or can't pass into a parameter!

Having to play this game of "alright I want to know how to use this API, so first I need to figure out what tutorial page _might_ use this" to find the tiny examples that should just be next to the methods I care about in the reference is really frustrating.

This, I’ve already said it in another reply but FastAPI is 10x harder to use because of this. I’ve had to read FastAPI code many times to literally reverse engineer features because they are not documented in any way.

Documentation is for reference, tutorials are for learning, I just don’t even understand how maintainers don’t go crazy with the absolute lack of references…

And SQL Model is even worse in that regard.

maintainers just having to assume every behavior is needed for backwards compatibility... and you still have the absolute mess which was pydantic 1 -> 2 (or django-ninja 0.x -> 1.0)

Everyone talks about moving fast and being dynamic but everyone I know deep in this has lost like actual years to churning from this kind of behavior.

I’ll second this, and add that docstrings are becoming ever more useful as modern editors learn how to show them inline when I hover over a symbol. Starlette lacks docstrings entirely and it’s a real miss in my opinion.

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