"Amid a wash of paper, a small number of documents become the critical pivots around which every project's management revolves. These are the manager's chief personal tools." (William Bengough, "Scene in the old Congressional Library", 1897)
"Notice that even the data is commented. One of the most effective ways to document a program is simply to describe the data layout in detail. If you can specify for each important variable what values it can assume and how it gets changed, you have gone a long way to describing the program. [...] Document your data layouts." (Brian W Kernighan & Phillip J Plauger, "The Elements of Programming Style", 1974)
"The best documentation for a computer program is a clean structure. It also helps if the code is well formatted, with good mnemonic identifiers and labels (if any are needed), and a smattering of enlightening comments. Flowcharts and program descriptions are of secondary importance; the only reliable documentation of a computer program is the code itself. The reason is simple -whenever there are multiple representations of a program, the chance for discrepancy exists. If the code is in error, artistic flowcharts and detailed comments are to no avail. Only by reading the code can the programmer know for sure what the program does." (Brian W Kernighan & Phillip J Plauger, "The Elements of Programming Style", 1974)
"Writing a computer program eventually boils down to writing a sequence of statements in the language at hand. How each of those statements is expressed determines in large measure the intelligibility of the whole; no amount of commenting, formatting, or supplementary documentation can entirely replace well expressed statements. After all, they determine what the program actually does." (Brian W Kernighan & Phillip J Plauger, "The Elements of Programming Style", 1974)
"The representation of knowledge in symbolic form is a matter that has pre-occupied the world of documentation since its origin. The problem is now relevant in many situations other than documents and indexes. The structure of records and files in databases: data structures in computer programming; the syntactic and semantic structure of natural language; knowledge representation in artificial intelligence; models of human memory: in all these fields it is necessary to decide how knowledge may be represented so that the representations may be manipulated." (Brian C Vickery, "Concepts of Documentation", 1978)
"Even though it is better if the system can be used without documentation, it may be necessary to provide help and documentation. Any such information should be easy to search, focused on the user's task, list concrete steps to be carried out, and not be too large." (Jakob Nielsen, "Usability Engineering", 1994)
"The following two statements are usually both true:
There's not enough documentation.
There's too much documentation." (Larry Wall, [Usenet article], 1997)
"But code as a design document does have its limits. It can overwhelm the reader with detail. Although its behavior is unambiguous, that doesn’t mean it is obvious. And the meaning behind a behavior can be hard to convey. […] A document shouldn’t try to do what the code already does well. The code already supplies the detail. It is an exact specification of program behavior. Other documents need to illuminate meaning, to give insight into large-scale structures, and to focus attention on core elements. Documents can clarify design intent when the programming language does not support a straightforward implementation of a concept. Written documents should complement the code and the talking." (Eric Evans, "Domain-Driven Design: Tackling complexity in the heart of software", 2003)
"Good code is its own best documentation." (Steve McConnell, "Code Complete", 2004)
"Documentation is a love letter that you write to your future self." (Damian Conway, "Perl Best Practices", 2005)
"Developing fewer features allows you to conserve development resources and spend more time refining those features that users really need. Fewer features mean fewer things to confuse users, less risk of user errors, less description and documentation, and therefore simpler Help content. Removing any one feature automatically increases the usability of the remaining ones." (Jakob Nielsen, "Prioritizing Web Usability", 2006)
"Any comment that forces you to look in another module for the meaning of that comment has failed to communicate to you and is not worth the bits it consumes." (Robert C Martin, "Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship", 2008)
"Features have a specification cost, a design cost, and a development cost. There is a testing cost and a reliability cost. […] Features have a documentation cost. Every feature adds pages to the manual increasing training costs." (Douglas Crockford, "JavaScript: The Good Parts: The Good Parts", 2008)
Software is usually accompanied by documentation in the form of big fat scary manuals that nobody ever reads. (Dave Barry, "Dave Barry in Cyberspace", 2010)
"In addition to developing the proper culture, invest in your testing infrastructure by developing linters, documentation, or other assistance that makes it more difficult to write bad tests." (Titus Winters, "Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time", 2020)
"Documentation is a practice concerned with all the processes involved in transferring documents from sources to users." (Brian C Vickery)
"Documentation is not understanding, process is not discipline, formality is not skill." (Jim Highsmith)
"The guy who knows about computers is the last person you want to have creating documentation for people who don't understand computers." (Adam Osborne)
"This is generally true: any sizeable piece of program, or even a complete program package, is only a useful tool that can be used in a reliable fashion, provided that the documentation pertinent for the user is much shorter than the program text. If any machine or system requires a very thick manual, its usefulness becomes for that very circumstance subject to doubt!" (Edsger W. Dijkstra, "On the reliability of programs")
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