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157 lines
29 KiB
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## 1. Entry points
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### "Natural" reader
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Documentation that assumes a certain type of reader can result inaccessible. The recipient is often thought to be similar to the writer: familiar with the subject, comfortable with technicalities, and able to cut through the precise jargon and esoteric references offered as explanation. Ultimately (and in most cases) the reader is someone else. This mismatch turns entry points into barriers that filter out who can participate in coding.
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Whenever too much technical proficiency is required to even read the documentation, knowledge becomes inaccesible, and confined in the ivory tower. Not filtering information becomes a filter to who can engage with it, a backfiring practice that reinforces the segmentation between who is allowed in and who is not: only the already knowledgeable ones can access, while others are kept out. Contents need to be curated, that does not mean oversimplified or generalised, but rather made legible.
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Cultivating legibility is not an easy task, especially when it comes to computer technology: a cards castle of abstractions built on top of other abstractions. These abstractions are more than just metaphors: they are interconnected narratives and intertwined plots and main characters at the same time. The purpose of an abstraction is to function as a symbol, as a mentally manoeuvrable concept, free from the details of its technical implementation. Yet the piling up of these structures makes for a dense forest with no clear path to follow in sight. Programming is the perfect rabbit hole because of the depth and complexity of each layer that makes up the digital stack.
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Take a course such as the one presented by Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken in _From NAND to Tetris_, where they slowly build a programmable computer capable of running the classic game, starting from simple NAND logic gates, in other words, from microchips and electronics. Layer after layer, from boolean operations with 0 and 1 to registers and CPUs, from machine language to high level programming. Here one can try to unwind the coil and start understanding programming from scratch, but this approach is best suited to a university curriculum, and it's often not very effective when facing real-world problems, with real-world constraints, and real-world circumstances.
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A deep understanding of technical systems is of course admirable and desirable, given the insights it can provide into the infrastructures that shape our everyday lives. But it cannot be the only mode of access available. Deep understanding comes with its own learning curve, and it can be a barrier for many people. Yet, many, many guides resemble this setup: pieces impossible to read if before one hasn't read an equivalent illegible piece of documentation and so on, tracing back till the invention of the wheel.
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A different kind of approach, more modelled on the way technology and coding meet us in real life, starts from the middle and tries to make sense of its surroundings. One could just need to make a website, for instance. And could just start doing that, following a guide or a tutorial. Soon questions would start bubbling up. Made from scratch or with a framework? And which one to choose? What about the backend? Where to host it? On which kind of server? Static or dynamic? And the Content Management System to upload new materials? And where to get the certificate for secure connection? These things surely are important, but there is no really need to know everything beforehand to put the website online. Programming is provisional: leaving TODOs in the code to come back later.
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The series _Programming Projects for Advanced Beginners_ by Robert Heaton embrace this methodology. Each projects offers some guidance through the different steps involved when coding a particular application: a login system, a simple game, a graphic filter to apply to the webcam, etc.
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One nice aspect of these guides is that they don't refer to a specific programming language: they are decoupled tutorials that leave space to the reader to integrate and adapt the steps to their own coding contingencies, while at the same time helping in building a lexicon, teaching how to search for informations, reading error messages and find their way through.
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Like in _NAND to Tetris_ things are built gradually. Here however the process is iterative and circular, instead of linear. Implementations are put in place provisionally, and then reiterated and developed more: introducing new concepts not as hardcoded procedures, but as a result of emerging problems.
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The entry points here are multiple as the spokes in a bicycle wheel. They come from different directions and don't frame the code as a prescriptive and rigid system, but rather as a crafted balance between different forces and needs in play. This kind of technical objects feel less monolithic and more approachable.
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A lesson can be learned: sometimes code is about performance, sometimes is about flexibility, sometimes is about accessibility, but rarely about everything at once. Programming means to balance between these different aspects depending on the situation. Keeping it in mind when writing code documentation gives to the writer space to adjust tone, intensity and approach based on who is going to read these docs.
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### Programming language
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It's not only a matter of contents and approach to technicalities, but also the very language with which they are formulated and exposed.
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Historically code documentation has been addressed to a very specific public. The places where software was developed back in the days, universities, civilian and military research labs and IT companies, were mostly frequented by white dudes.
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This really particular monoculture probably comes as a result of several overlapping factors: the prohibitive costs of higher education, the concentration of foundings in really specific parts of the western world, a patriarchal society that didn't foster women in technical sectors, and a racist and segregative model that systematically forced minorities and people of color into subaltern and menial tasks.
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Ellen Ullman is a programmer and author, one of the few women working as developer in the Silicon Valley during the 80s and 90s. The combination of having a background in the humanities, being a self-taught programmer, and especially being a woman, made her the archetypical outsider in the IT industry. At the same time, this very position granted her a unique ethnographic perspective, capable of looking critically at this environment, both from the inside and from the outside.
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In her books, she reports how the presence of female figures was unevenly distributed in the IT sector: while visiting tech conventions, women were to be found just at computer trainers and technical writing conferences, some in the application development field, _"high-level, low status, relatively-low payments"_ . Closer to the machine: the desert. In the _low valley of programming_ not a female person in sight, for these [more technical conventions] are gathering of young men. (1997, 2016)
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Many episodes in her writings describe interactions with coworkers where she is directly attacked because being a woman daring to enter the (total dudes situation of) technical zone of engineering. Or a client harassing her while she was working to fix his database. Or the segregation of _cheap latina workers_ hired to do mechanical data entry in the room next to the mainframe's one, where all the other guys were gathered.
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!!! note ""
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"Workers leaving the Googleplex" present this same last situation more than twenty years later, with Google pushing minorities towards subaltern unskilled work. See: http://www.andrewnormanwilson.com/WorkersGoogleplex.html
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This condition is reflected also in the pages of code documentation. Technical manuals and software specifications have been addressed—and written from the point of view of—this very specific public, populated mainly by male engineers.
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Mara Karayanni researches on technical documentation from a feminist perspective. The project _Read The Feminist Manual_, published with Psaroskala Zine, presents an investigation of gendered language in software manuals. One case studies is about the `gettext` localization program from the GNU community. The program provides a system to internationalize other code, to let developers translate prompts and contents in different languages other than english. It's an application that already implies a collaboration between different kinds of knowledge (developer, translator) in the making of software. Yet, the manual opens with the sentence:
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_"In this manual, we use he when speaking of the programmer or maintainer, she when speaking of the translator, and they when speaking of the installers or end users of the translated program."_
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This gendered language comes with an embedded separation of roles.
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Open-source software development happens with code contributions within communities, and indeed someone submitted a patch to change pronouns in the documentation, proposing a neutral approach to undo the stereotypes, and broaden the people represented by the documentation. But the contribuition was rejected, and the pronouns remains. Eventually a disclaimer was added: that the gendered language is by no mean to say that certain roles are best fit for males, and that the phrasing is just a way of writing more clear instructions.
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Karaianni reports further discussions in the GNU mailing list, where the proposition is turned down in favour of grammaticaly correct english, and because no need felt for fair representation in a technical object. As argued in _Read The Feminist Manual_, the stubborness against gender neutral language in technical writing is but a pretext for refusing to waiver the priviledge of the male programmer.
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Toxic geek masculinity reinforces stereotypes such as gendered roles in programming, and refuses to acknowledge the participation of diverse identities in the making of software, starting from the very language and attitudes used when writing documentation. Seen from this perspective, documentation becomes an important space where to build community aroud software. For who are we writing code documentation? Who is going to read it? Who are we keeping out and who are we letting in? Who is represented and feel invited and welcomed?
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### Welcoming writing
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Writing documentation is demanding. It's more delicate than programming, and require a whole set of skills usually not treasured by the dev community. A kind of emotional intelligence and sensitivity far to be found in the competitive and pragmatical wastelands of the IT industry. Here no one wants to write documentation, nor pay someone to do it. As a result, in a world where software thrives, documentation still seems to be a scarce resource.
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It's ok, someone could argue, every question that can be asked on Stack Overflow, will eventually be asked in Stack Overflow (versioning Atwood, 2007). The popular Q&A website for developers is just an example of digital knowledge as a shared effort, together with the endless mailing lists, forums, discord servers and dedicated sources for whatever topic. It's astonishing how online communities can tackle any problem in no time.
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But it's not rare for these places to feel unwelcoming, or even hostile. In 2018, Stack Overflow publicly admitted that there was a problem concerning their userbase. The space felt unfriendly for _outsiders_, such as newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups (Hanlon, 2018).
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For years there have been discussions on the platform about tone. At the question _"Should 'Hi', 'thanks', taglines, and salutations be removed from posts?"_, one of the founders of Stack replied with a [RegEx](https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/93989) to filter _automagically_ what some of the experienced users perceived as noise. This _regular expression_, a way to target specific text patterns in programming, started then to be silently applied to every query sent to the website, trimming out etiquette and leaving just technicalities.
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Far from being just an isolated problem, this crudity is deeply embedded in the IT discourse, soaking through technical writings as well. The denigrating expressions of superiority in matters concerning programming that Marino calls _encoded chauvinism_ (Marino, 2020) constitute the main ingredient in the brew of toxic geek masculinity. _Real programmers_ don't use this code editor. _Real programmers_ don't use this programming language. _Real programmers_ don't care about others feelings. Etc.
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Ellen Ullman's accounts of the emotional dumbness of her _real programmers_ colleagues give an insight of a problematic behavior, first intercepted and then capitalized by the IT industry. _"In meetings, they behave like children. They tell each other to shut up. The call each other idiots. They throw balled-up paper. One day, a team member screams at his Korean colleague, 'Speak English!' (A moment of silence follow this outburst, at least.)"_ (Ullman, 2017)
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Programming means to deal with picky stubborn machines that don't overlook a single typo. It requires a high tolerance for failure. It is frustrating. But to project this frustration onto other users, as in the `Read The Fucking Manual` typical response to a request for help, it's a form of negative solidarity: others should suffer as I did when trying to understand how code works.
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Mark Fisher used this image in the context of labor under capitalist realism, where workers are forced in precarity and isolation. Here as in a downward auction, people are driven to bring down each others. (2013) I'm using it with a focus on the emotional component: not just lack of empathy and solidarity, but also reproduction and legitimisation of toxic behaviors in coding communities. When all the energies are invested in debugging, the quest to find and solve all the problem in a program, and no space is left for introspection, programmers start behaving as machines. This lack of empathy it's a barrier for the participation of others in the making of software.
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Here some examples that go in a different direction, on different scales.
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`p5.js` is a popular Javascript library started by the artist Lauren McCarthy as online porting of Processing, itself being a project to promote both software literacy within the visual arts, and visual literacy in software development.
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The work of documentation around `p5.js` offers entry points to the world of programming, taking care of not taking too many things for granted. The amount of care and efforts in their tutorial about [debugging](https://p5js.org/learn/debugging.html), for example, results in a welcoming article with different levels of accessibility. Here the drawings help to visualize complex concepts, the tutorial format is beginner-friendly, and the narration makes for an interesting reading also for who is already familiar with debugging.
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One of the most frightening aspects of programming is to be confronted with stack trace errors: when things don't work as espected and red error messages show up. These scarlet letters delivered by code are useful for developers to identify where in the program the error happened, but often they are dense of technicalities and difficult to decipher. Worst case scenario for beginners. The explanations from the `p5.js` Education Working Group tackle on this nightmare showing not only how to read technical errors, but how to think through them with different debugging methods. From here the stack trace starts to get less alien and scary, less like a wall and more as a starting point to solve the error.
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Another reflection on entry points and gatekeeping comes from the english artist and writer James Bridle. Their practice explores the cultural and ecological impacts of digital computation, walking and jamming the thin line between what is showed and what is kept hidden in the technological landscape we live in.
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When opening the browser inspector in the Facebook website, one faces a wall. A message printed in the console halt users from accessing the page hidden structure. The platform adopted this approach to prevent scams and Self-XSS attacks to their users, that could have been lured into running malicious code in their own browsers by malevolent people. However, instead of encouraging their userbase to understand, explore and eventually feel more safe against these cyberattacks, the company opted for a full stop, marking a clear line between user and developers.
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`welcome.js` (2016) is a small gesture in response, a tiny Javascript library published open source on GitHub under a permissive MIT license, where Bridle injects some greetings in their website (and in all the websites that include the library) to welcome users to the browser inspector. The artwork is hidden below the surface of the website, printed in the console of the browser inspector, a tool which allows users to see underlying code of the website they are visiting. From here it provides some guidance for newcommers to access, inspect and modify the source code of web pages. A process to open doors and let people in, giving them more agency by demistifying technology.
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Whether in big project or small gesture, attention to language can be transformative. In code documentation it can help deconstructing the false dichotomy between programmer and user, or pro and newbie. It can create spaces that feel more safe, where people are invited to participate, express themselves and contribute to the community. It can help undoing the impostor syndrome that affects many programmer, and that feed on some hidden and inaccessible fundational knowledge nowhere to be found in code documentation. It can help to cast some light onto the massive amount of work around the making of software: recognizing all contributions, not just the ones from engineers.
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### Documentation as gardening
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When the docs does not reflect the behavior of the project, or when there are discrepancies between the two of them, the reliability of both code and documentation is undermined. Code documentation requires as much maintainance as code itself. Code transforms and documentation should follow.
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There's a moltitude of ways in which changes in the codebase reflect on the documentation. New features ask for new sections. Breaking changes with previous versions require warnings and instructions on how to migrate towards the new one. Bugs and unexpected behaviours are to be addressed. Deprecated functions need to be trimmed out, or marked as outdated.
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On top of all the technical aspects, the editorial work has to be taken into accounts. Adjustments and corrections and line-editing, clarifications of convoluted paragraphs, rephrasing of confused sentences, highlighting of important passages. Certain projects support internationalization, and the contents are translated and adapted to different languages' structures.
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Documentation can be as simple as a plain text file stored nearby the code. A `README.txt` that invites developers to have a look before diving into the program. As projects get bigger and more articulated however, the demands for more comprehensive and structured formats arise. The printed matter of technical manuals have today transformed and spread into many different shapes. Wiki and websites generated with various tools, each with particular focus and features. All these platforms imply more work: maintainance, design and sometimes guidelines and documentation for the surface where to document itself.
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Writing docs is not a once in a lifetime effort, but rather a continuous commitment. It's a process with its own pace and timing, and similar to gardening is a form of care both for code and for the community around it.
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It's a process that requires a massive amount of energies and resources. Yet, it seems to be constantly understimated, undervaluated, and pushed towards the margins. Something left for when there's nothing better to do, something to delegate. Something perceived as a burden, as a killjoy, a display of weakness from _real programmers_ that should be able to understand a program by directly reading the sourcecode.
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All these effort are a good display of what advocated in the Post-Meritocracy Manifesto by Coraline Ada Ehmke and more than other six hundred signatories: the making of software is not just a matter of engineering skills, but interpersonal relations and social dynamics, where all the contributions around code are important as the one on the code itself.
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Documentation is a surface where all the sociality, relations, and context around code are rendered visibile. An interface between the technical world of machines, the affective sphere of the community, the delicate and demanding economies of open source projects, and the politics of distribution, circulation and participation in the making of software.
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A surface that in turn can be activated and used as a platform to reach all the different actors surrounding it.
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### Getting startled
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Reading undocumented code feels like being an ant walking on a big painting. You can see the strokes of a brush and have an intuition of their direction, but what's missing is an overall idea of how the composition flows. Documentation provides guidance through the bunch of functions and statements that makes software, a bird's eye perspective. It is often the first thing one gets across when approaching a new library or programming language, and it shapes the way a developer thinks about particular piece of code.
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At the very first encounter with a new script, details about its source code are unknown. Programming is a play _in medias res_, and documentation acts as narrator. Describing how functions are stitched together, or an algorithm is implemented, it sets the stage for developers to participate. Showing the different steps of a program and how they are connected, it offers entry points for interventions.
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For example [Vue.js](https://vuejs.org/guide/essentials/lifecycle.html#lifecycle-diagram), a popular library for building web user interfaces, explains with a diagram the lifecycle of its components: at which moment data are received from a server, at what point an element is rendered on screen, and when it will disappear. What at the beginning feels like magic, gradually appears more clear. Presenting a structure means also presenting a way to reason about it. The reader gains some understanding and agency over the tools they are about to use.
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Code documentation is not just pure introspection. Consider the diagram made for the Padliography, a bookmarking system to collect links of otherwise scattered Etherpad documents. It describes not only what's happening in the code, but taps also into its surroundings: the Soupboat server and the XPUB and Lens Based Mediawiki instance.
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The introduction to a program situates it within a larger ecosystem: how to install it, and what dependencies it requires to work properly. As Geoff Cox and Winnie Soon elaborate on their decision of a downloadable code editor instead of a web one for their classes, code is more than just a single piece of software. It is also the relations with the configuration of one's own computer and operating system. (Cox and Soon, 2020)
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Their book _Aesthetic Programming - A Handbook of Software Studies_, is an example of how documentation can be a loom where to weave together technical and critical thinking. The book explains the basic concepts of programming: it starts from variables and loops, to arrive at more complex topics such as machine learning or speech recognition. The technical curriculum offered is in line with other similar resources that target non-engineers. What's different here is a commitment to critically enquiry themes such as colonialism, racism, gender and sexuality, capitalism and class, and how are they embedded in code. Soon and Cox prepared these lessons for students enrolled in a design institution, and curated the pubblication addressing a public familiar with the discourses around software studies. Thanks to the vantage point of writing documentation for beginners, they could be super explicit and go all out with generous amount of references.
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For hatching programmers, the initial imprinting of documentation is a powerful tool to orientate code in the world.
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### A code companion
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The devil is in the details, and software as well: the translation between human and machine has to be negotiated with all the specifics of a particular programming language or platform. Sometimes for the web, sometimes for a hardware component, sometimes for another operative system. These _specs_ make every piece of code a bit alien and peculiar. Tinkering with code is not just knowing by heart a programming language, but rather having to deal with a lot of different recipes for different occasions, and know how to adapt.
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Documentation is not just for beginners: it's a code companion. One never stops reading. Even experienced programmers must refer to docs when first encountering a software, and return to the references when they need a refresher on the syntax of a particular command. They continuously look at code from multiple distances: close to the source code through lines of comment—ignored by the machine, but much appreciated by fellows developers—or from printed books, along with pages of explanations and use cases.
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This tentacular surface can reach a programmer in different moment of their life: from the _hello world_ to the _how to uninstall_. This is possible thanks to the multitude of shapes documentation can take: video tutorials and commands cheatsheets, _README_ files and complete guides featuring colored images. Daniele Procida proposes a systematic approach to organize this wealth of formats (Procida, 2017). His framework focuses on the needs of different kinds of readers: by leveraging between practical steps and theoretical knowledge, it charts four main modes of technical writing. Each format comes with its own approach and intentions, and in response to different questions.
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A text that fails to address who's reading can result inaccessible and frustrating. Although the Diataxis framework doesn't encompass every particular situation, its structure offers good aid to situate documentation within different perspectives. This turns out to be really helpful in the process of writing, as a way to fine tune tones, and modulate the nature of shared info. _Tutorials_ offer entry points for the newcomers, while _explanations_ unveal core mechanisms for more navigated readers. _How-to guides_ teach how to get the work done, while _references_ report lists of information ready to be consulted. Different documentations for different readers for the same code.
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Or rather, the same documentation, for the same reader, for the same code, just at different moments in their life. Programmers' needs gradually change, as well as the answers they are looking for, but still, they keep returning to read the docs.
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