On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 12:47 PM, Cédric Beust ♔ <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 8:20 AM, Josh Berry <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> I can't help but thinking the "javadoc" style of thinking >> you can jump in at any given method to fully understand what is >> happening somewhere is a fallacy that causes more harm than is >> admitted. > > > How is that a fallacy? I think it has worked very, very well overall. I > consult Javadocs several times a day (most of the time from my IDE, which is > another great progress in documentation browsing) and it does help my > productivity significantly. Obviously, a Javadoc is only as good as the > quality of the comment, but by now, Java has some very spectacularly well > written doc across the board (both the JDK and external libraries such as > Guice or Guava).
For API items, it works wonderfully. So did/do man pages for utility files. Most of us are not writing an API. So, my contention is that they do little to help understand a full program? They help document parts of something, but they do not do anything to show how the parts fit together. And many folks obsession with them does more harm than is generally admitted. > > Just this morning, somebody posted on scala-debate a very interesting report > of his experience getting up to speed on Scala, and here is one of his > points: > > There is definitely a huge price to pay developing Scala code because the > IDE support is so poor. Writing Java code in Eclipse goes so much easier > because of all the help the IDE editors give you. The fact that Eclipse lets > you hover the cursor over things and brings up these great semi-persistent > tool-tips with hyperlinked javadoc makes productivity incredibly high. I realize there is often a lot of amusing derailments into the realm of promoting scala. It seems there is an equal number of derailments into the realm of bashing scala, as well. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
