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This is true.

I must admit that my more recent, positive experiences are only possible due to my accumulated understanding of my dependency chain and toolkit. I work on multiple things, but my largest, indefinitely-running one has only a single dependency...but it's a truly beastly, poorly documented enterprise system. It took me almost 2 years before I properly understood the system's intended usage, interfaces, intents, bugs, and pitfalls.

The JavaDocs are awesome in their uselessness:

  /**
   * Sets the Wimbulator.
   *
   * @param wimbulator
   *     the Wimbulator to set
   * @param identifier
   *     the identifier to use
   * @param flags
   *     flags
   * @param legacy
   *     used to apply legacy
  */
  public void setWimbulator(Wimbulator wimbulator, String identifier, long flags, boolean legacy);


view as:

Hey! That's every JavaDocs I've ever encountered. See the Apple CoreAudio docs for instance. Auto-generated and never revisited.

Such doc systems are a crime - the Manager asks "Is the documentation complete?" and then Engineer says "Well the auto-docs were created but..." and the Manager says "Good, lets move on"


On the other side of the spectrum, we have something like the Qt documentation: https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qwidget.html

Which is a step up from the documentation you get (if you get any at all) in custom development:

    /**
     * The constructor
     */
    public Wimbulator(boolean q)

Wow, those are awesome compared to most of the docs for the obtuse, wildly popular enterprise system I match wits with.

I resort to decompiling.


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