[erlang-questions] Erlang documentation -- a modest proposal

Lutz Behnke lutz.behnke@REDACTED
Fri Sep 23 10:36:50 CEST 2016


I would propose a position specific to the reference documentation:

8) Put the documentation in the source code. Use edoc (or similar new tool).

This would not take a step in the direction of 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming (which I think is a 
type of holy grail that stiving for is good, but reaching will not 
really help), but also put pressure on edoc to improve the presentation 
(pos 2 in Joe's list).

But it would also help when the documentation is not sufficient to 
provide understanding: first you can look at the documentation website. 
Should that fail to provide understanding to the user, he or she has a 
clear system of going from docs for module X to source of module X and 
looking there. Much more daunting, but a clear escalation path. Also 
just grepping for phrases from the documentation is quick and to the point.

And it should a precedent for 3rd party libraries. Java doc/ Doxygen are 
fairly good examples for wide spread adoption or integration into other 
tools. And it helps me write docs when I can still remember what the 
func actually does.

Other Point: Joe, getting the OTP code drop from github is not a problem 
at all. one copy and paste on github website, two clicks in eclipse. 
Voila: manual work done.
BTW: This does not contradict your point on user-comments on the docs 
website. php.net was pointed out in this discussion before. The best 
code examples there are in the user comments.

mfg lutz

Am 23.09.2016 um 10:13 schrieb Joe Armstrong:
> I have a few comments about the documentation:
>
> This answers a few question that keep arising, and has a few of my own
> suggestions.
>
> Q: Who was the documentation written for?
>
> A: Ericsson Internal usage
>
>    The original documentation made the following assumptions
>
>    - The readers would be internal Ericsson programmers who knew Erlang
>    - If the programmers had a problem understanding things they would ask
>      us directly
>
>    So we favored a terse declarative style
>
> Q: How is the documentation structured
> A: It's all in XML
>
>    The idea was that all documentation would be generated from the XML
>    There are current about 1000 XML files containing about 10MB of text
>
>    The XML sources are in the distribution source tree.
>    So for example the documentation for lists.erl is in the file
>    <Dir>/lib/stdlib/doc/src/lists.xml (<Dir> is where the system was unpacked)
>
> Q: How is the documentation produced
> A: Programmatically
>
>    Various programs munge the XML inputs (and the sources) trying to make
>    web-sites and PDF
>
>    We could use some help here - really - the PDF is produced with
> some XSLT magic
>    and the web site with goodness knows what.
>
> So what's wrong and what could we do?
>
> 1) Things are not beautiful
>
>    I agree - the documentation is not typographically beautiful
>
>    Personally I like PDF - I took a look and found this:
>
>    http://www.latextemplates.com/template/the-legrand-orange-book
>
>    It would be nice to transform the documentation into this form
>    for printing and reading
>
> 2) The HTML documentation could be improved and made more interactive
>
>    I have at various times written 'erl_to_html' that makes HTML pages out of
>    erlang - it would be nice to browse your own code, clicking on function names
>    to follow the code or to unfold the documentation.
>
>    On-line documentation can have things like type spec in hidden folds
>    which open in place when you click on them. Or possibly a tiddly-wiki like
>    interface.
>
>    http://tiddlywiki.com/ might inspire a new interface
>
> 3) There is no official proof-reading quality control mechanism
>
>    I tried on several occasions to hire a technical author - management always
>    views this as a waste of money - so this never happened.
>
>    Most of the documentation is written by people who are not
>    native English speakers. They could use some help.
>
>    By contract my Erlang book had
>
>      - Me (who wrote it)
>      - Dave Thomas (my editor) (he was great)
>      - A Proof Reader (By proof reader I mead one of these super-human beings
>        who can spot a spelling error at 10,000 meters from your text,
>        while reading upside down by candle light
>      - An Indexer (did you know there were professional Indexers?)
>      - A typographer (who worried about
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widows_and_orphans)
>
>    Have you every heard *anybody* complaining about widows and orphans
>    in the Erlang printed documentation? I had to rephrase several
>    paragraphs to avoid nasty widows and orphans.
>
> 4) There are no examples
>
>    I agree there should be zillions of examples.
>
>    Rather than adding them to the existing XML tree I'd propose a new
>    DTD for examples which could be cross-linked into the
>    documentation.
>
>
> 5) There are no construction examples
>
>    Examples show "the finished work" but not "how you got there"
>
>    In my book I often shown really short functions in 10 lines or so
>    of code.  But I don't discuss how I got to those ten lines.
>
>    I show the 10 lines and explain what each lines does.
>
>    I do not explain how I wrote the first line - I might have googled
>    a bit done some research. In a 50 line program I'll probably have
>    tested it as I grew it - testing 10 lines at a time.
>
>    How we grow programs from small seeds is not explained.
>
> 6) The barrier for entry for fixing a typo is HUGE
>
>    If I see a typo (a simple spelling error) in the on-line documentation
>    the barrier of entry for fixing it is HUGE (sorry for SHOUTING).
>
>    Download the entire distribution - unpack (240 MBytes) find the
>    typo (where the heck is it?) - fix it - make a push request ....
>
>    Do I really have to download hundreds of Megabytes to fix a one
>    character typo?
>
>    I keep pointing people to the web site for "real world Haskell"
>    http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/functional-programming.html
>
>    The barrier for entry to fixing a mistake in the text is minimal.
>    I actually like the RWH model - the reader adds a comment, the author fixes
>    the bug.
>
>    When writing books I would not like other people fixing my typos, I
>    want many eyes to help be find the typos - then I'll fix them? Why
>    is this? Because I'm ultimately responsible for what I write -
>    Sometimes (not often) I might want to totally rewrite a section
>    based on a single typo.
>
>    If somebody could figure out how to automate fixing typos it would be great.
>    [the problem is to find the XML that needs to be edited, given that the error
>     was found in a generated document - I guess if each paragraph has
> a hidden GUID
>     <<WHICH I'VE BEEN RANTING ON ABOUT FOR YEARS>> it would be trivial]
>
>    <aside>All paragraphs should have GUIDs and be stored in a global content
>    adressable store (why GUIDs? - we could use the SHA as a key but
> they we could not
>    edit the paragraph :-) </aside>
>
>
> 7) The erlang mailing list has loads of examples
>
>    The erlang mailing list has thousands of useful examples
>    but they are not extracted, edited sorted and classified.
>
>    There are issues of copyright and attribution here - but I think
>    it would be useful to extract some of the better postings to this list
>    and move them into the documentation tree.
>
>
> Making beautiful readable useful documentation is very difficult and
> needs love care and attention to detail - it's an unappreciated form
> of literature.
>
> On Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 8:40 AM, Loïc Hoguin <essen@REDACTED> wrote:
>> On 09/23/2016 05:18 AM, Kenneth Lakin wrote:
>>>
>>> Speaking of the User's Guide... -ideally- someone with no Erlang
>>> experience should first be reading the Reference Manual User's Guide
>>> along with the Getting Started Guide (or LYSE or something) to pick up
>>> the fundamentals, rather than the various module Reference Manuals. In
>>> my experience, reference manuals exist to quickly provide useful
>>> information to people who are already familiar with a language. They
>>> shouldn't be language primers, as primers serve another purpose and
>>> should be in another document.
>>
>>
>> That's the thing: you have no control over what document people will read
>> first. You also have no control over what people will *remember*.
>>
>> When first coming to the language, most people will
>> forget/misremember/misunderstand most of what they read until they get some
>> practice; and that's when a good function reference with all details and
>> examples is helpful.
>>
>>
>> --
>> Loïc Hoguin
>> http://ninenines.eu
>> Author of The Erlanger Playbook,
>> A book about software development using Erlang
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-- 
Lutz Behnke
Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften Hamburg,
Labor für Allgemeine Informatik,

phone: +49 40 42875-8156    mailto:lutz.behnke@REDACTED
fax  : +49 40 2803770       http://users.informatik.haw-hamburg.de/~sage
Berliner Tor 7, 20099 Hamburg, Germany



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