English is the de-facto language of the Internet (let's not discuss here how damaging that is to English as a language in general). I strongly believe that public-facing software projects should be documented in English first and foremost, with translations to other languages added as resources allow.
I work for a small company in Quebec (that's the Canadian province that has a Language Police) - despite most of the team being Francophone, all our internal documentation and code docs are in English. Why would that be? Because everyone realizes, without ever really having discussed it, that it is the only efficient way to do it, if we want to collaborate with others, if we want to grow, if we want others to contribute, having everything in French would be creating unnecessary hurdles.
The article isn't saying to write things in another language as canonical, it's just saying put the language in the URL so later you can add other languages without breaking the URL.
I think that is what you are advocating in part of your response.
I'm a consultant in Quebec and I've seen too many companies document code in French. Sometimes variable and function names are in a mix of French and English. The worse is when your errors and exceptions are in French: you get very confused international clients. English reading and writing skills are a MUST for programmers and I envy your working in what sounds like a much nicer code base.
Absolutely! Codebases in "franglais" are terrible. Also, when documenting such codebases, I cringe whenever I see public APIs with mixed language members.
Germany has the same problem. Many haven't even learned to read english since everything else in germany is dubbed. Very frustrating. Here in sweden most things are written in english though so no problem. No one even thinks twice before writing comments in code. English is the standard.
Spot on! English is not my first language, but I still document and use English variable names in all my code. This includes the tinyest one-off scripts.
Not only is this good if you ever want to share the code, but I find myself thinking about programming in English.
Specifying the language with an /en/ in the URL isn't a major inconvenience, and allows for future expansion at the cost of 3 additional characters in an URL.
Including it says "I planned ahead and worked intentionally", which shows you care, which fundamentally is what this article is driving at.
And yes, documentation should generally be in English first - it's the current language of science and tech, just as it was when French, German, Latin, Arabic, and Greek proceeded it.
Adding an /en/ when you decide to translate the documentation isn't a major inconvenience either. I would rather add it when it's relevant than include something that will probably never be anything but noise. This is pretty much the same reason I don't put in a bunch of non-functioning UI controls that will hopefully have features attached in the future — my interface is meant to be practical, not aspirational.
What about controlling the language from a cookie? Link to www.example.com/v1.5/import.html
and end up with whatever language your browser specifies. A drop-down with links to all possible languages for this page so you can choose the one that fits you best. This enables you to have an incomplete translation in case you just don't have the resources to translate your whole documentation at once.
I used to think the same. But as for any rule, there are exceptions. Documenting a Swahili project dealing with parsing official Swahili resources may not be best done in english, just translating every idiomatic notion into english would be a waste of time, effort and won't help anyone.
System that only make sense in a specific context should be OK to be documented in the most appropriate language.
I have to say that I completely disagree with this perspective. Yes, currently our 'lingua franca' of business and technology is English, but I feel that is a problem, not a solution.
It's a problem because it unfairly advantages native English speaking people in business. It creates a barrier of entry to people who did not learn English from an early age, along with their native language. It makes it much harder for those people to be part of business, technology, and open source. It degrades the quality of communication and work-output by forcing non-native speakers to express themselves in English.
Does being a good engineer imply being good at spoken natural languages? I have met some brilliant engineers in China who are barely functional in English. If you were to interact with them purely in English, you would think you're talking to a 5 year old, based on the language alone. Some of the engineers I've met in China aren't even that capable with English, but are wonderful developers writing interesting things.
Sometimes they created documentation in Chinese, sometimes in English. Guess which one they were able to express their ideas in more clearly? Chinese.
When you write, you should write in your native language, and express your idea to the best of your ability. Then, if you want to translate that to other languages later, to make it more accessible to others, do that as a separate task. Maybe hire a professional technical translator to do that work.
You gave this example of coming across a page written in Lithuanian or Japanese, presuming of course that you're not a native speaker of those languages. Fine, that's exactly how every Chinese native speaker feels when they come across a page of English text, every day of their life as a developer... but they figure it out, even with terrible language skills. You know why? Not because "English is the language of business" but because they just want to learn about the content, and aren't going to try to force you to write it in Chinese so they can do that. If all those pages were in French they would figure that out too.
With the attitude you expressed above, the main people who benefit from this are native English speakers. Anyone else is still in the 2nd language boat. So then of that group, you advantage people with a talent for natural languages, or who are wealthy enough, as a child, to have access to education resources to learn another language. As a former English teacher in China, I promise you that this is a huge economic divide. The kids who can afford to learn English succeed, those who can't, don't. That's fucked up, and not at all a reasonable way to approach business. A good engineer should not be left with no opportunities because they grew up poor, or have no real talent learning foreign languages.
In business, such concerns about equality and fair access might not be very important, because unfair advantages and competition are what much of business is all about... but in open source, and in modern businesses that are learning from the open source model, I think being concerned with inclusiveness is paramount. So yes, you might have to struggle through reading something like this:
... but it doesn't take much to punch "Youki 是一个文档生成语言，其具备完整的编程特性和完备的宏特性，使之可作任意复杂的文章。Youki 是完全开放源码的，依照 MIT 协议发布。" into Google Translate (or use the auto-translate features of Chrome). Now we can all get on with our lives and use be5invis's cool documentation generation tool.
Would you prefer to exclude him and his work from our community by forcing him, a Chinese square-peg through some English speaking round-hole? Personally, I'm willing to do a little extra work to understand him in his own language. I also appreciate deeply that he has to do that work constantly, in order to read my code/docs in my native language.
Most people in the world do not speak one of the uber-languages (english, chinese, spanish etc). These people are particularly poorly served by a drive to document in their native language rather than a common language. If someone only speaks Xhosa and never gets to exercise a documentation-common-language, then they'll only be able to read and contribute to documentation in Xhosa, which is a much smaller community than 'everyone'. And what if the leading engineer in your field didn't document in that language? You'd be cut of from what they had to say.
A common documentation language functions as a technical standard, like IPv4. Sure, you can use your own standard, perhaps IPX, but you'll only be able to communicate with a much smaller group of people.
It's hard to get documentation written in the first place, let alone good documentation. Making it 'fair' by saying that documentation has to be effectively splintered into every native language is a sisyphean task.
As always, write to your audience. If it's a general tech audience, that means English. If it's Chinese engineers who don't speak English well, that means Chinese. But those Chinese engineers are going to have an easier time interpreting foreign documentation if it's all in one language rather than 50.
I don't disagree. The problem of standards is that sometimes they help and sometimes they hurt. They always seem like a great solution, but rarely are.
Wouldn't it be nice if we all spoke the same language?
So much less conflict, so much more efficient.
Wouldn't it be nice if we all had the same cultural background?
So much less conflict, so much more efficient.
Wouldn't it be nice if we all looked and acted exactly the same?
So much less conflict, so much more efficient.
Wouldn't the world be a nicer place without all this pesky diversity?
So much less conflict, so much more efficient.
In the end, there's not one correct answer. The point of documentation is communication. Communication is a very malleable thing. It is negotiated on demand and the form of it varies a lot. The real beauty of many of our underlying systems is their ability to negotiate a protocol, not the pervasive standard use of a single protocol.
A couple personal stories:
Once, I was in Switzerland, and went to a Chinese restaurant. The waitress spoken Cantonese (1st), Swiss (2nd), and Mandarin (2nd). I spoke English (1st), German (2nd), and Mandarin (2nd). We quickly figured out that we could communicate most effectively in Mandarin, and so we did.
Later on in that trip, I went to an Italian restaurant. The owner spoke Italian and some very limited Swiss, but no English. I couldn't speak Italian or Swiss enough to communicate with him. Instead, we used gestures, body language, and pictures. It worked out, and I got one of the best plates of lasagna I've ever had.
The message here is that language is not standardized, and will never be, so calling English a standard is just a failure of reason. It's a sub-par medium for communication for the majority of the world.
You never know who is going to walk in the door of your restaurant to order food. Do your best to communicate with them, without too many assumptions, and you'll find that communication can be negotiated easily.
That said, in more practical terms, I actually encourage the use of less text, but more pictures, examples, and tactile learning approaches in documentation. When text is required, it should be "High Fidelity" and that means, written in the native language of the person writing it. Then, you have the ability to degrade fidelity later, by translating it to whatever language you've negotiated for when the native language doesn't match.
I agree that language is not standardized and should never be.
I see English in programming as the somewhat lowest common denominator. At least in the "western world".
From all the 4 languages I learned and some more I messed around with, English was the easiest to get to a basic level. On Par with Spanish. This is highly biased of course.
Although my mother tongue is German(Swiss), I usually avoid documentations, tutorials, etc in German for multiple reasons.
- The mix of english terminology, germanized terminology and normal German makes it hard to read.
- They are mostly just translated and not rewritten, which sometimes leads to some strange formulations.
- I'm forgiving/ignorant for grammatical errors in foreign languages
- They tend to be outdated.
I agree that documentation should only use as few text as possible and as much necessary. Editable and runnable examples are the best way in my opinion. Also, no matter what language, documentation should be written using simple words, short sentences and not try to win a pulitzer prize.
I don't mind documentation in English. What really pisses me off is, when I have to work with software where the developers/designers clearly didn't account for things like letters with stuff on it (éàüöøñ…), variable sentence lengths, date formats, etc.
It's a sub-par medium for communication for the majority of the world.
However it's currently the best universal medium we have, and you're arguing to actively remove that, rather than replace it with a system that improves global communication.
Not to mention "can I have one of these items of food that you prepared" is a much easier concept to convey than technical information, which can get quite nuanced. Figuring out how to analyse a stack trace is not something you can do with body language. And body language isn't universal, either.
Yes, language is not standardised, but we're talking about language for a specific purpose here, not language in general. Don't get me wrong. I like to be around a variety of languages, though I'm a monoglot. But I don't see the point in trying to remove an extant common language out of a philosophical sense of fairness, when it would actually decrease communication between people.
Wouldn't the world be a nicer place without all this pesky diversity?
The slippery slope you're painting here doesn't exist. Having a common language is not the same as turning everyone into WASPs and doesn't lead to it, any more than speaking Spanish means that Mexicans, Peruvians, and Spaniards are the same culturally. Or speaking French meaning that the French, Algerians (half of...), and Quebecois are the same culturally.
Ok. Now I am genuinely curious. Could you point me to projects/code samples from this person?
I have never come across a situation such as you described and I am very curious to see proof positive of someone phenomenally bad at English and phenomenally great at programming. Please, help expand my horizon!
For the record, I am a non-native English speaker.
Historically, I've been accessing documentation as an administrator rather than a programmer.
There are a couple of documentation habits that have driven me half mad over the years.
* Broken Usage Examples:
It's bad enough when an example demonstrating some now deprecated feature hangs around in the introductory text that every new user will cut their teeth on. It's an immediate vote of no confidence when typos or plainly busted syntax makes it into the docs.
* Confusingly Abstract Examples:
Please no ./foobar -f foo -b bar -i foobar.foo -o barfoo.bar. Just paste an actual usage example, explain it and be done with it. A cousin to this is the use of overly complex "Look how clever I am!" examples.
* Explanation By Analogy / Google:
Saying things like "configuration files use ____ syntax" without summarizing or at the very least linking to a definitive reference for "____ syntax".
* Insane Defaults:
This is really a design concern, but if we're already past that point and destructive / poor performing default behavior is the chosen path at least clearly document that fact.
---
On a related note, when I'd just started to augment my sysadmin background with code I saved time by writing scripts, small utilities and general automation.
As I've learned more, my savings increasingly come from being able to jump into the code to diagnose the odd behavior of poorly documented programs instead of endless profiling, searching and experimentation.
Any marketing, at all, in documentation really complicates my research.
I was already interested in the product, and I'm trying to solve a problem with it. I understand the use case. I don't need to know how this saved X company $XXX,XXX dollars per second over the past billion years.
Obscuring the meat-and-potatoes technical specifications behind phrases like, "cloud ready" and "virtualization optimized" just makes it harder to evaluate the product.
"If your documentation is a directory full of files on GitHub, I close the tab."
Without even stopping to see if there is an INDEX or README that gives the files a hierarchy? Without considering whether those files are well-written? Without remembering that plain text files are portable, easy to author in many tools, and easy to view on many devices? You'd rather see a glitzy website with no content?
"If your documentation is generated from source code, I am immediately skeptical."
Even though keeping documentation with the code it documents makes it more likely the two will be in sync? Even though some library authors use their source code documentation tool to write entire files that are nothing but documentation? Maybe you're viewing it wrong: my documentation is not generated from source code. My documentation includes the source code and will generate the library.
Since he seems bent on judging things in 30 seconds I guess it is inevitable that he will elevate form over substance.
Sure, keep the files as plain text in the repo, I'm all for that. Just don't make it the main interface for viewing them. You are really arguing that a GitHub file browser is the best UX for viewing documentation?
Sure, keep documentation about code in the source code. Where exactly in the source code does your tutorial go?
You seem to be reading into a lot of things that aren't in the article based on what you want to hear.
If someone can't figure these things out, by all means, go use someone else's library. This sort of documentation would not be acceptable for a consumer product like TurboTax, but a programmer needs to know how to view a text file.
I know how to view a text file, or even navigate a directory of them. But as forsaken said, a GitHub file browser is often not the best UI for viewing documentation, especially when you're already in a browser.
What's better, the docs for Backbone.Marionette[0], or Backbone[1]?
To me it's more common that elaborate form covers up lack of function.
What's important is writing an understandable library. Documentation cannot paper over a bad design. If it takes a ream of documentation to document something, sometimes the time spent on the docs would have been better spent writing a cleaner interface.
And simple documentation is in proper form. I'd rather spend time writing documentation than learning some new gee-whiz framework for writing documentation. Even time spent putting together a website is time that could have been spent writing documentation.
Another advantage of in-tree documentation is that the docs come with the code. When there's a separate website, you have to consult this separate place. Someone else in this thread pointed out that sometimes you can't get docs for an old version. Not a problem when the docs are in the VCS along with the rest of the code.
I agree with most of these, but this one stuck out.
> I believe that translating documentation is a really important step towards helping people learn to program. Someone shouldn’t have to learn Programming and English at the same time.
Really? Knowing English is pretty much a prerequisite for programming. Should all UNIX man pages exist in other languages too?
That said, of course tutorials in other languages are useful, but it's hardly the job of the open source project.
EDIT: "Prerequisite for programming" in the literal sense is obviously wrong. It's very useful though, and pretty much a must to participate in most big open source projects (mailing lists, issue trackers, comments, documentation). Is this really a controversial statement?
> Knowing English is pretty much a prerequisite for programming.
Emphatically no. You can be a brilliant programmer without knowing English. Of course, that doesn't say that knowing English somehow hurts.
I've met many programmers smart enough to learn programming to expert levels despite not knowing English and having to rely on whatever was available in other languages - sometimes that was plenty, sometimes they had to reinvent algorithms. At the same time I know other good programmers who were faced with the problem of learning programming and English at the same time and succeeded at that.
The latest version is also available at its own eternally up-to-date permalink (also the default), so if you want to bookmark the documentation, or samples, or intro guide at whatever the latest version might be, you can just substitute latest for the version number:
(The same goes for the current Beta, if there is one, at /beta/)
In addition, the top of the page in the documentation (or bottom of the page, in the samples) always displays the currently-viewed version number.
We try hard to make sure nearly all classes are introduced in prose, and have a separate set of technical introduction pages to accompany with several live examples (One of the more wonderful things about writing a JavaScript library!)
Most languages now have a tool for writing and hosting documentation to make this as easy as possible for you. The author of the post runs http://readthedocs.org/, which is primarily used by Python developers, for instance.
The advantage of these standardised tools is that it gives most documentation for projects in a given language a common 'look'. Go libraries have one kind of appearance, Python ones another, and so on. This tends to make navigating around much easier.
I created a website that automatically generates documentation and examples for libraries in Go (and Python, Ruby, and JavaScript). Here's your project on it:
A good host will redirect to the proper version of the docs when presented with a root URL, but how do you link someone to a specific language, if the Accept-Language is the canonical source for this information?
Wouldn't the use case be just "link to the right spot in the docs" and the user's client requests the appropriate language automagically? That way the link is valid for everyone, and it shows each their preferred language.
If I'm reading something in language A which deep links me to some documentation, I think it's quite likely that I want to see it in language A, not language B which happens to be my machine's native language.
For example recently I was linked to a Microsoft page via a comment, but it rendered in Japanese, which was a pain to me because I was looking for a specific citation in English. I had to switch language then dig through the site to get back the text the comment author was talking about.
No. I read multiple languages. Maybe my friend wants me to explain something in the docs they are reading - should I need to change my browser language to check it for him? I want to look something up from a university computer where I am studying in France - I can never see the docs in my native language from a public computer? I want to look something up on my friends laptop - it has to be in his preferred language?
It is nice to try and help a user, but you should always let them override your language decision.
Automatically selecting a language based on the Accept-Language header value can be a nice feature but isn't a universal solution, and there are reasons to not do it. As another commented noted, it can be helpful to have the desired language specified via the URL for bookmarking and permalink reasons. Another problem is that some users don't know how to configure their browsers to declare a preferred language. Another problem is that some users do not have a single preferred language, and may prefer one language for certain contexts and another language for others. For such users, it's preferable to simply pick the language that they want from the site's UI.
Some sites automatically choose a language based on the client's location, and for similar reasons, this can be more annoying than helpful to certain users.
It's hard to take documentation advice from a blog with a low-contrast text.
If I have to struggle a little to read your text, it's clear you're more interested in looking cool than conveying information - a sin as bad as any in the article's list.
Not everyone speaks English? Yes, well, not everyone has an excellent screen that brings out the colours you've selected just so.
Not to mention whatever web font that is [1] renders terribly in windows. If I cannot read your article on criticizing text communication without copying and pasting the contents into a text editor, I close the tab.
Yes I had the same problem but at the end I found a useful button called "Page source". That one makes the page readable again. It's just a normal textfile then .-)
Documentation "…when it is good, it is very, very good; and when it is bad, it is better than nothing."
- Dick Brandon
Second of all, I couldnt disagree more with this statement for certain types of projects:
"If you included all of the things needed to document a project in source, your code would be unreadable."
I believe in self documenting code with additional information for API functions. A really good way of doing this is with wonderful tools like Doxygen: http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/
Not reading Github pages is stupid and ignorant. You can use Github as a publishing platform. It CAN be good enough for documentation for a small or medium sized project. This can allow quick creation of fairly nice docs, allowing the coder to get back to coding. Hell, all the kernel docs are text files. You gonna tell me you'll never read them on principle?
Judge documentation by its quality of content, not its publishing platform.
> If your documentation is a directory full of files on GitHub, I close the tab. With GitHub Pages, Read the Docs, and other places to host generated documentation for free, not making an effort is unforgivable.
He's not arguing against GitHub pages - he's arguing against just linking to a file/folder in your GitHub repository and thinking you're done (e.g. https://github.com/<org>/<project>/docs).
GitHub renders markdown files. So the difference between clicking on navigation links in a documentation website and clicking on markdown files in a GitHub docs folder is... the CSS theme.
As I see it, the author of TFA is simply offering some heuristics for judging whether or not he's going to have a hard or an easy time working with a project's documentation. So in this view, presenting documentation using a structure that is specifically intended for documentation is taken as an indicator of care and attention to detail. I wouldn't say that he's arguing that a directory full of files isn't functionally equivalent or isn't useful.
(Personally, out here in the real world, I'll put up with all sorts of limitations — even a complete lack of documentation — if somebody else's existing code solves a problem that I have.)
> If your documentation is a directory full of files on GitHub, I close the tab.
I don't get this at all. Why is a static site (where it's unclear which branch it was generated from or when) better than a bunch of nicely-rendered markdown files stored in a directory?
I use most code from OS projects and I've always preferred good use examples. I see a lot of overly simple use examples which really give no direction for a new user(Apple ios examples). Any format works but list all the methods of a class. And list what arguments they accept and the acceptable types of each. And finally list what is returned.
I document my code as a business logic statement. Eg given credit card, process payment. I then write the validations in a way that reads simple and thus is documentation. If it's a complex line that takes more that a few seconds to parse mentally. I will write out what it does. That's pretty rare. Non programmers never see my code so that works just fine.
I judge the quality of documentation by having interactive examples. Words are great, and also important, but interactive demos that exist within the documentation go a long way to assisting people in learning your project.
ReadTheDocs [1] is by far the best platform to have documentation. The simple reason: Everything gets into an Elasticsearch server (sponsored by Rackspace) which means you get wonderful full text search (and faceting).
Sadly they aren't useful if your documentation is more complex. For my project I do use Sphinx for the doc, but there is a prebuild stage where some of the API information is extracted from non-Python text files (C source). Another part runs the example code and captures it as RST. There are various other nuances like that.
readthedocs can't build that (make docs would work on my tree). I've contacted them several times to ask for how to proceed and never get an answer.
I think the author is conflating "quality" of documentation with "usability" of documentation. They are probably correlated, and this might make a good filter for ignoring BAD documentation, but a documentation site can be very "usable" without containing quality content, and it can contain quality content without being "usable"
I've been evaluating using a wiki for some of our documentation, with DokuWiki. It uses plain-text markup files, but also allows for some collaboration between users. I can see where it wouldn't be so hot on the version front, but I'm hoping that we can come up with a procedure to keep those text files in a repository.
I really hope the golang community doesn't consider godoc.org to be the beginning and end of their project documentation. It's a fantastic service and probably Good Enough for small projects, but if larger projects don't include prose like Effective Go it's going to really hurt adoption.
I'm with the author until he says to encode extra information into the URL. If the docs and the site are built well, you should find everything you need while completely ignoring the URL structure.
The latter form clearly presents the possibility of jumping straight to a different version's foo docs, to the docs homepage, etc. I'd consider this a quality of good UX.
English is the de-facto language of the Internet (let's not discuss here how damaging that is to English as a language in general). I strongly believe that public-facing software projects should be documented in English first and foremost, with translations to other languages added as resources allow.
I work for a small company in Quebec (that's the Canadian province that has a Language Police) - despite most of the team being Francophone, all our internal documentation and code docs are in English. Why would that be? Because everyone realizes, without ever really having discussed it, that it is the only efficient way to do it, if we want to collaborate with others, if we want to grow, if we want others to contribute, having everything in French would be creating unnecessary hurdles.