A Reasonable Approximation

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A Half-Baked Idea for Keeping Code and Docs in Sync

It's widely regarded that documentation is an important task that doesn't get as much attention as it deserves.

There are a lot of proposals for how to fix this, but I think they typcially miss something. "Write the documentation before the code", for example. Sounds good, but a lot of the time, until I write the code, I don't know what it's going to do. Maybe I have a rough idea, but the details are going to evolve. And sometimes I'm just going to get things wrong. Oh, I can't frobnicate the spam here unless I also make the user pass in an egg - this is the sort of detail that would be easy to miss when I'm thinking about a function, but impossible to miss when I'm trying to frobnicate the spam without an egg.

And of course, having written a function and documented it (in whatever order) - you can subsequently rewrite the function without redocumenting it. This is the well-known problem where the code and the docs get out of sync.

You can't have a rule "don't edit the code unless you first edit the documentation", because a lot of code edits don't need doc changes. A more complicated rule like "don't edit the code unless you first edit the documentation, unless the documentation doesn't change" would probably just be forgotten. After a while, whenever I ask myself if the documentation is going to change, I'm just going to return the cached answer "no" without thinking. In any case it has the same problem: I don't know what I'm going to change until I change it.


So here's my half-baked proposal that might help to solve some of the problem of keeping code in sync with documentation:

If your code is in a git (or other VCS) repository, you can look at a function and see whether the code changed more or less recently than the docstring. It would be possible to write a tool which searches for such functions automatically.

Bam, done. The rest is just details. Edit code all you want, and if you forget to update the docs, this tool will remind you next time you run it.

Okay, some details are important. Here are some things to think about:


Would this work? How much effort would it be to make? Would it be helpful, assuming it did work? For that matter, does something like it already exist?

Posted on 16 January 2015

Tagged: software

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