this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
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Programming

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Algorithms instead of source code !! (lemmy.world)
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/programming
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Disclaimer : I am a hobbyist programmer, I have not gone to Uni for that , so I might not know everything I am talking about.

My question is why don't open source programs include something like diagrams of the algorithms they employ ?? I Was looking for algorithms for a chat program with client-server architecture, I was hoping to find diagrams and descriptions of how algorithms work, so a to study them an adapt them to my needs. All I found were FOSS projects with no such documentation.

Considering that reading source code can take a long time, and sometimes interesting projects are written in a language the user isn't familiar with, I was wondering why such documentation style doesn't exist ? It could help even newer contributors get started quicker.

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[–] MagicShel 17 points 10 months ago

Also, it's not just that it's boring, difficult, and undervalued, but also during development the code is constantly changing and to constantly spend 20 minutes updating documentation for a 3 minute change that might or might not solve an issue is horribly wasteful of time. So by the time a project releases, probably 80% of the documentation is outdated already.

The only exception to this I'm familiar with (though I'm sure there are others) is using OpenAPI to generate both source code and documentation from a configuration file. That way your documentation and code are always in sync. But that's a relatively narrow use case that isn't going to cover low-level stuff like algorithms.