Is extensive documentation a code smell?

Posted by Griffin on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Griffin
Published on 2012-10-07T02:49:05Z Indexed on 2012/10/07 3:51 UTC
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Every library, open-source project, and SDK/API I've ever come across has come packaged with a (usually large) documentation file, and this seems contradictory to the wide-spread belief that good code needs little to no comments. What separates documentation from this programming methodology?

a one to two page overview of a package seems reasonable, but elegant code combined with standard intelisense should have theoretically deprecated the practice of documentation by now IMO.

I feel like companies only create detailed documentation and tutorials because its what they've always done.

Why should developers have to constantly be searching through online documentation in order to learn how to do things when such information should be intrinsic to the classes, methods and namespaces?

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