View source for Documentation Is Evil

There is a tendency in software engineering to believe that documentation is a good thing, and that more is better. I believe that documentation is actually evil; documentation takes effort to write and time to read. However, we need to communicate information and documentation is often the least bad method. That makes documentation a necessary evil, not a good thing. The approach therefore should be to write the least possible to convey the idea, but no more. This site will attempt to keep the writing to a minimum in keeping with this principle.
 
Of course, Mark Twain often said the same thing, only better (more concisely)...
<center>''Anybody can have ideas - the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.''</center>
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He advised the use of plain English (one of my failings is a tendency to be excessively polysyllabic)...
<center>''I never write "metropolis" for seven cents when I can write "city" and get paid the same.''</center>
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And to avoid flowery language (another of my many shortcomings). Note the implicit importance of proof reading to reduce verbosity...
<center>''As to the adjective, when in doubt, strike it out.''</center>
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I hope that I have the time to make the entries in this site short and concise, rather than having to offer Blaise Pascal's apology...
<center>''I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter''</center>