From: Walton Hoops Date: 2009-10-07T09:52:29+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby for the wrong reason > From: Michael W. Ryder [mailto:_mwryder@worldnet.att.net] > How much of the Ruby standard library is a port of the C standard > library? This has been documented since at least 1992 and is readily > available. This is at least the second person to say this, and I find it a little scary. Just because C has these functions documented does NOT mean that it is OK for Ruby not to. Just because C has a function named sprintf does NOT mean that a Ruby/Python/PHP/any other langauges' sprintf will work the same way. Imagine this for a minute: there is a new browser in town. Everyone loves it. So you decide to give it a shot. You find a really cool page and you want to bookmark it. You look around, find the bookmark menu and click add. It provides two empty textboxes with no labels. So you look up adding a bookmark in the docs, and there is nothing there. So you head for the mailing list and ask for help. Everyone says "No need to document it, it's thoroughly documented in Firefox's documentation" Is that good documentation pratice? Bottom line: When I go to look up a function and I find no notation whatsoever (not even "see 'x' function in c") it is not good documentation, and it does not make for a good user expierience. (This from a newbie who is loving the language, yet constantly, hating the lack of documentation)