WTFM

RTFM or "Read The Fucking Manual" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTFM) is a amusing, if vulgar, phrase that arose from people not reading the documentation for how something worked, and the complaining when it did not work or when they did not understand it.

Last week I spent literally twelve hours pouring over the code for a library that I was hoping to integrate with some code I was working. The library was very poorly documented, with some of the vague documentation contradicting other parts of the documentation. This reminded me of an alternative phrase that has popped up in recent times, WTFM or "Write the Fucking Manual".

With programming becoming a more and more common practice and more and more emphasis being placed into writing code very quickly (a perversion of Agile techniques), documentation of code is going be the wayside. This is very bad. Why is it bad? Two reasons, danger and waste.

It is dangerous to not write documentation because the other hot topic these days, is software security. When one fails to properly document a codebase the people who are working with the code base (either in library form or other developers working on a shared project) are much more liable to make errors that could introduce security bugs in the code base.

It is wasteful because as I already mentioned, I spent twelve hours reading the documentation for a library. The library was complex, but the actual API wasn't supposed to be complex, and I should have been able to adapt it to my code in a couple hours. Unfortunately there was some subtle strange behaviour that took my a long time to work out because of the terrible documentation.

This is a waste. That time I spent could have been used better, and many many people suffer from lack of good documentation on a daily basis. It is a tragic affair. So WTFM.