Nerdcore 4 Life

An important part of my project(any project) is documentation. Toward this I looked at quite a few documentation systems and decided to go with Doxys. It’s an extension of the open source Doxegen, but they fixed the HTML output. Doxegen tended to make massive, hard to read pages.

The problem is the guy who wrote Doxys is a programmer. Programmers see a problem and work from the ground up to fix it. Since Doxegen is open source the author was able to get right into the code and make the output exactly what he wanted. Which is good, right?

Except that Doxegen can also output in XML. A system engineer would have looked at that and seen how much easier it would have been to write a program that parses the XML and outputs the HTML from that. Let Doxegen do the heavy lifting and your program can work on the actual problem, hard to read HTML pages.

I admire programmers(I obviously consider myself one) but this mini-asperger thing is probably the biggest problem in software engineering today. Guys with incredible knowledge build programs to do a job and then when the job shifts slightly or there’s a problem with it the team has an impossible time fixing it.  A little forethought would have made Doxys a force to be reckoned with. Put a web interface on an XML parser and you have the greatest documentation tool out there.

Instead you have a slightly less annoying auto documentation system. Which would you rather have your name on?

Note: I’m not mentioning the author by name because I really do appreciate his tool and am thankful for his work, but it just could have been so much more