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October 28, 2019 05:15 pm

Apple, Your Developer Documentation Is Garbage

Software developer Chris Krycho writes: Over the past few months, I have been trying to get up to speed on the Apple developer ecosystem, as part of working on my rewrite project. This means I have been learning Swift (again), SwiftUI, and (barely) the iOS and macOS APIs. It has been terrible. The number of parts of this ecosystem which are entirely undocumented is frankly shocking to me. Some context: I have spent the last five years working very actively in the JavaScript front-end application development world, working in first AngularJS and then Ember.js. Ember's docs once had a reputation of being pretty bad, but in the ~4 years I've been working with it, they've gone from decent to really good. On the other hand, when I was working in AngularJS 5 years ago, I often threw up my hands in quiet despair at the utter lack of explanation (or, occasionally, the inane explanations) of core concepts. I thought that would have to be the absolute worst a massive tech company (in that case, Google) providing public apis could possibly do. I was wrong. The current state of Apple's software documentation is the worst I've ever seen for any framework anywhere.Swift itself is relatively well covered (courtesy of the well-written and well-maintained book). But that's where the good news ends. Most of SwiftUI is entirely undocumented -- not even a single line explanation of what a given type or modifier does. Swift Package Manager has okay docs, but finding out the limits of what it can or can't do from the official docs is difficult to impossible; I got my ground truth from Stack Overflow questions. I've repeatedly been reduced to searching through WWDC video transcripts to figure out where someone says something relevant to whatever I'm working on. Several people have complained in recent years that Apple's documentation is often incomplete or missing altogether. A developer has tried to figure out. Accidental Tech Podcast, a popular podcast that talks about Apple's ecosystem, discussed the issue in a recent episode.

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