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RE: Proposal #10 - DevPortal Documentation Update - One Pull Request
The sparse documentation is a real problem with Steem. Even the APIs that do the RPC calls for you like (steem-js). I think it shouldn't be such a problem for developers to express their intentions when they write code. It's an incredibly lazy attitude on the part of them. We have no way of knowing what the true intentions were. Perhaps they meant to have a pattern to apply to the rest of the API.
Quotes from The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
I've taken this quote to heart. My defense for any inaccuracies there might be is that I'm reverse engineering. I don't know what their defense is.
All this to say, it's not explained strictly by laziness. I also think there are intended patterns, but they are clarified over time. They have to balance strict pattern adherence against breaking changes, and that's not easy.
Some of this balance has been happening over time without much notice. For example, the new AppBase patterns are being translated by jussi. This effort is good because it allows the patterns to change without breaking older implementations. But it's also bad because older implementations don't have to update.
Interesting. Perhaps when memcpy from C (which today is documented very well) was new they expected it to work with overlapping memory ranges but later found that such a situation was a corner case that broke what are normally error free and optimized implementations.