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Hugo is awesome, its documentation is not

sagar.se

31–40 of 128 posts

Re: Hugo is awesome, its documentation is not

#31
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you suggest to write a title that’s less inflammatory? I have a higher tolerance to this type of language. Some people find any critique offensive. Some embrace it. With any public confrontation, you’re bound to get a spectrum of people with various reactions. How do we make sure criticism, even harsh, needs space in public dialog whether it is open source or not? If it’s meant with good faith, that is. Peo…

Instead of "sucks", how about any of these: * My Frustrations with Hugo's Documentation * How Hugo's Documentation Confuses Me and How to Improve It * Why I Don't Like Hugo's Documentation The key thing I've done here in the first three is to reframe the criticism as an _opinion_ ("I", "me", "my") rather than an absolute ("it sucks"). I don't think it's too much to ask people to state their opinions _as opinions_ in…

Those are all great suggestions and that’s what I would use.

However, if you look under the facade, when talking to your colleagues and with people around you, “sucks” is very much a common, daily word.

This is the way I look at it. Sure, it’s not professional. But, the author is not trying to be professional I suppose. I am not going to debate it’s appropriateness.

I want to be clear, the point I’m debating is not about “sucks” per se, but any general criticism. Whenever you need disclaimers, it could mean two things 1) Rude or unacceptable title 2) Society expects unreasonable conformity and adherence to a particular language, set of values, etc.

In the case 2), we had a huge debate about “master vs main” branch. There are many examples.

We’d be better off dialing down the conformity and be more inclusive. Check in deeper about intentions and faith, than the facade of language. If the author used the language you suggested, but had bad intentions, that’s a bigger problem.

Re: Hugo is awesome, its documentation is not

#33
post #10
post #3

This gives a few good examples of how the Hugo documentation could improve (the click-bait word "Sucks" in the title is a bit exaggerated, in my opinion). I would challenge the author to, in the spirit of open source, go ahead and make some of the suggested changes and submit the changes in a Pull Request!

The author could have saved a paragraph or two of preamble by choosing a less inflammatory title. No need to write a disclaimer about best intentions unless you chose language that could rile people up.

[deleted]

Re: Hugo is awesome, its documentation is not

#34
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of "sucks", how about any of these: * My Frustrations with Hugo's Documentation * How Hugo's Documentation Confuses Me and How to Improve It * Why I Don't Like Hugo's Documentation The key thing I've done here in the first three is to reframe the criticism as an _opinion_ ("I", "me", "my") rather than an absolute ("it sucks"). I don't think it's too much to ask people to state their opinions _as opinions_ in…

Those are all great suggestions and that’s what I would use. However, if you look under the facade, when talking to your colleagues and with people around you, “sucks” is very much a common, daily word. This is the way I look at it. Sure, it’s not professional. But, the author is not trying to be professional I suppose. I am not going to debate it’s appropriateness. I want to be clear, the point I’m debating is not a…

I don't think the issue is being professional or not. If the author's goal is to convince people who work on Hugo to improve the docs, then it's best to avoid triggering a defensive emotional reaction. The title as it stands will likely trigger hurt feelings, which is usually followed by being defensive or ignoring the substance of the criticism. That's simply unproductive.

Re: Hugo is awesome, its documentation is not

#36

It's a problem with most systems that introduce a number of new concepts, such as the documentation for the Spring framework. One answer as a reader to deal with the circularity by reading the documentation and then reading the documentation again and then read it again until you know where everything is and then you look it up. The worst thing about this situation is that people go look up wrong answers on programmi…

I'm working a bit with GCP infrastructure lately and I find Google's docs very well-written, but suffering from a bit of the opposite problem. Many docs are written as how-tos for very specific scenarios, often the most basic setup thinkable (which makes sense!). If you're trying to understand the abstractions in order to see what will make sense for your own project, it's a difficult way to get the full picture. :D…

Django has some of my favourite docs, organized incredibly well:

* Tutorials * Topic guides * Reference guides * How-to guides

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.0/#how-the-documentation...

Re: Hugo is awesome, its documentation is not

#37
I really dislike that I had to, but I migrated to Next JS for the sole sake of the IDE support that comes with JSX.

It's super convenient to have autocomplete, syntax highlighting and everything that comes with it.

If Hugo could have that too, I'd go for it in a second.

Re: Hugo is awesome, its documentation is not

#38

As someone who is a competent iOS developer but not much of a web developer, all I can say is that I completely identify with this critique. The Hugo docs are just straight to the deep end.

As someone who is(was?) a competent web developer, all I can say is that Hugo templating turned me off of the project. For as long as I used Hugo, I felt like I was in a horror corn maze.

Re: Hugo is awesome, its documentation is not

#39

It's a problem with most systems that introduce a number of new concepts, such as the documentation for the Spring framework. One answer as a reader to deal with the circularity by reading the documentation and then reading the documentation again and then read it again until you know where everything is and then you look it up. The worst thing about this situation is that people go look up wrong answers on programmi…

> such as the documentation for the Spring framework.

Oh god, so true. It doesn't help when it's not a single project, but fifteen hundred different projects (as is the case with spring) and it's impossible to find a coherent documentation beyond the most basic examples.

Re: Hugo is awesome, its documentation is not

#40
post #30

Feedback on my static site generator's documentation if we're here? :D https://mkws.sh/docs.html

> using sh as a templating language. You should probably explain what "sh" is. It may seem obvious to you, but not to everyone. Something like: > using POSIX shell "sh" as a templating language. (hopefully youre using POSIX?). Also, where is the source code? I see this: https://mkws.sh/mkws@4.0.16.tgz but do you really not use version control?

Not sure if people who understand

> POSIX Shell "sh"

don't understand

> sh

Thanks for the suggestion!

Yes, it's certainly POSIX, I don't use version control now, I run a back up cron every 30 minutes. Playing around without git.

Sources: https://mkws.sh/docs.html#sources

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