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Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody every does anything about it. Except him - he never complains about the weather.

-- David Mamet, "Squirrels"

Substitute "documentation" for "weather" and you get a pretty good description of "the documentation problem" in software development culture. Everybody laments the dearth of good documentation, but very few do much of anything about it. Spotty documentation seems to be endemic to software, especially open source software. On the other hand, who is to say what counts as "good", or even "adequate" documentation? What experts find adequate beginners may find useless, and what beginners find wonderfully helpful experts may find annoying.

The primary purpose of the Code Genres project is to explore the nature of technical (specifically software) documentation and its relationship to code, computation, etc.. A secondary goal is to generate specific tools and techniques in the service of good software documentation.

• Overview
• Some quotations
• Rethinking Literate Programming
• Code Lit Some literary concepts applied to programming texts
• The Meanings of Code: Denotationism and Expressivism
• Philology and Hermeneutics: the Art and Science of Reading Code
• Code Exegesis: Naming, Describing, Explaining
• Roles and Requirements Who are the consumers of code and documentation, and what do they want?
• On Documentation
• Tests as Documentation
• Resources