this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
59 points (94.0% liked)

Programming

17450 readers
78 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
snowe@programming.dev
Ategon@programming.dev
MaungaHikoi@lemmy.nz
59
What is the deal with API documentation that can seem so terse to a hobbyist? (lemmy.world)
submitted 4 months ago by j4k3@lemmy.world to c/programming@programming.dev
25 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I've encountered this many times where I simply don't understand the context and use of an API based of the API documentation unless I can find an example that already utilizes it in a working project. The first thing that comes to mind is Py Torch. I've tried to figure out how some API features work, or what they are doing in model loader code related to checkpoint caching but failed to contextualize. What harebrain details are obviously missing from someone who asks such a silly question?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 5 points 4 months ago

Because usually if you end up at the API reference in that situation it's a code / project smell that other stuff is going wrong.

If I want to use a library to do something, you should be able to search for what you want to do + language / framework, find the library's docs, follow the install instructions and then look through the highest level API / instructions and then just go from there.

If you find yourself confused at unhelpful API references that just means that they have badly written top level API docs, badly written intros, or quite probably just badly written APIs.