TL;DR: Writing documentation can be beneficial even for a lone programmer writing code that will never be read by anyone else; however, the benefits, when other programmers are involved, are cumulative and potentially huge in terms of time saved (of those programmers) when trying to grok the existing codebase. It is well known that programmers in general hate to write documentation. There are lots of reasons for this. For example, in the heat of writing code, the programmer simply cannot envisage what it would be like for someone else to come along in a couple of years and try to understand the code from scratch... And anyway, what does the programmer owe to that future person? (The programmer will likely have moved on by that point...) etc. etc. So, poor documentation (or lack of documentation altogether) is a problem that stems from the programmer, and probably left unfixed by the managers of the programmer, right up the chain of responsibility. This post isn't an attempt to add...
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