> Nobody's business was ever ruined because of bad documentation, sadly.
I've seen quite a few startups fail because they had a smart, but completely undocumented code base. Then the smart programmers leave and who is left cannot handle the code and new hires take too long to get into it. Then funding runs out and the apparent lack of progress ensures that nobody wants to put more money into the company.
> Literate programming is an interesting idea from academia, but in the engineering environment of most startups it's a waste of time.
Amazingly, we're actually getting back to something that resembles literate programming - via TDD. Instead of asking for a proper spec, we now ask for test definitions that the code must pass. Those can even be written in something that is pretty close to natural language (cucumber etc) so that management can write them. Then we spend time to make the test framework understand all those pseudo-natural-language test definitions and then we finally write the code. Is that really faster? Or are we just missing the tools that would allow us to tie a natural language specification to code?
I've seen quite a few startups fail because they had a smart, but completely undocumented code base. Then the smart programmers leave and who is left cannot handle the code and new hires take too long to get into it. Then funding runs out and the apparent lack of progress ensures that nobody wants to put more money into the company.
> Literate programming is an interesting idea from academia, but in the engineering environment of most startups it's a waste of time.
Amazingly, we're actually getting back to something that resembles literate programming - via TDD. Instead of asking for a proper spec, we now ask for test definitions that the code must pass. Those can even be written in something that is pretty close to natural language (cucumber etc) so that management can write them. Then we spend time to make the test framework understand all those pseudo-natural-language test definitions and then we finally write the code. Is that really faster? Or are we just missing the tools that would allow us to tie a natural language specification to code?