Documentation Is Evil

There is a tendency in software engineering to believe that documentation is a good thing. I believe that documentation is actually evil. Documentation takes effort to write and time to read. What is needed is the ability to communicate information; documentation is often the least bad method for achieving this. That makes documentation a necessary evil, not a good thing. This belief is also previlent with other forms of writing.

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 said the same thing, only better...

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. I never write "metropolis" for seven cents when I can write "city" and get paid the same. As to the adjective, when in doubt, strike it out.