@Jim Cooper, I see your point. But I disagree on some of your points, especially the following: You may need comments in your code, but they should be very rare occurrences. You may need documentation, but if I have to read both your code and your documents to understand any given piece of code, it means I'm going to have to maintain both your code and your documents. This rarely works well, either as a means to understanding, or as a practical matter keeping everything in sync. You should strive to make as much documentation as possible unnecessary. - Jim Cooper Comments and documentation should not be rare or unnecessary. They should be common and necessary. Do you expect every programmer to understand the code you've written without checking any documentation? The purpose of comments and documentation is to give you first the whole picture. The code is there for the details. Maintaining code that has no documentation is far difficult than code with documentation. If code and documentation aren't necessary, why do these popular frameworks (for example frameworks for Java) have to write documentation? If people are smart enough, these developers don't even need to put a special site detailing instructions or FAQs or even docs for their frameworks. All they need to do is post the zip file, and they should be done. But you see a lot of people are thanking these people for writing documentation. They appreciate it. Then it means something. It means it helps them. Why would you deprive your fellow programmer of something that can greatly help him in his understanding? Is there anything wrong with that. I rather do extra work documenting than allow my fellow programmer struggle. After all, I'm a programmer. I know how difficult it is to maintain code that has no documentation. Believe me I had handled a big chunk of framework that doesn't even have documentation.