HACKER Q&A
📣 mitchbob

What programming languages have the best documentation?


Suppose you're starting from scratch with a new programming language, and your goal is to become productive and able to complete a reasonably ambitious first project. Are there languages whose official documentation is good enough by itself to get you there?

  👤 frantzmiccoli Accepted Answer ✓
The one that comes to mind here is PHP:

1. You have a documentation page per function whose primary aim is to give a day to day usage example. 2. The documentation integrates an outdated comment system, with comments that seem to predate dinosaurs ... interestingly enough, when you have deeper question, it's often interesting to read them, half of the comments are terrible but it still helps. 3. The layout is well executed so that you quickly find on the page the high level explanations, the examples or the arguments documentation.

👤 mikece
Do people learn languages from official documentation? Throughout my career I've spent thousands of dollars on books from O'Reilly, Wrox, Apress, and others to learn every iteration of the Microsoft web stack (from 1997 to present) as well as JavaScript. With JS the books tend to be out of date before they are published so it's typically more useful to follow a blog or YouTube series to get up to speed on things like React or Vue or (whatever is new now... I'm out of the loop on this). I think the only official documentation I've ever used was for libraries (React, Flutter) and not the languages themselves.

Regarding books: if I would have realized 20 years ago that I could have gotten most of those books from the public library I could have saved a lot of money. Lots of public libraries offer access to eBook services like O'Reilly's Safari books online... but the wealth of info on YouTube right now is staggering. You could go from zero to near PhD level CompSci just on the videos and material being published by major universities.

👤 lahvak
What exactly is "official documentation"? Does hoogle count? Because if it does, I vote for Haskell. Racket's documentation is really good, too.
👤 yen223
If TailwindCSS counts as a language, then TailwindCSS's docs are some of the best I've used. It's arguably the best way to learn not just Tailwind, but CSS itself.

Otherwise, the Rust book is also up there.

👤 Victerius
The R statistical language has a large asortment of libraries and accompanying documentation.