Thoughts on "Documentation Avoidance for Programmers"

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Documentation Avoidance presentation

You can view the presentation by Peter Hilton here: Documentation Avoidance for Programmers.

Some of the tips are ridiculous (and said tongue-in-cheek). Hilton says you can go on Slack or IRC and ask other programmers what a particular class does (even if you already know), and then just copy their answer and use it for documentation.

Peter also mentions tactics like responding to requests for documentation by saying, “It’s on the wiki” (even when you know it’s not). Most likely the users will look in vain and then not really bother you again. If they do come back and say they can’t find it, you can then go write it and send them the link (hoping they don’t look at the timestamp).

I can’t imagine any programmer actually carrying out these tactics. I think some of these tactics are delivered to produce a reverse effect: to persuade developers that not writing docs turns out to be more