WTFM - Write The Freaking Manual
I would upvote this a million times if I could. I'm one of the kinds of people who wants to read the entire reference manual, front to back, before using a programming language, library, etc. I want to make sure I know exactly what it does, the proper way to use it, and what it doesn't do. This is both so I can make an informed choice about the technology, and it saves a huge amount of time in the long run.But it seems like there's a big trend now to just "get things out there" and that good documentation isn't "cool" anymore, kind of like braces in syntax.Examples of good docs: PHP, jQuery, MySQL. (The first two sites include user comments too, which make things even more useful.)Examples of terrible docs: Python, CoffeeScript (the worst)I can at least understand insufficient docs for pre-1.0 versions when the implementation is changing constantly, but when something has been around for more than a year, it's just inexcusable.I don't want a "getting started" guide that gives a bunch of examples. I don't want to type in the console to find out what methods an object has.I want a friggin' reference manual, that includes (as applicable) syntax rules, exact rules governing whitespace, orders of operations, all functions, all parameters, parameters passed to a callback (why are these forgotten so often?), default values, flag values, all possible return values, specific exceptions that can be thrown, what input parameters result in undefined behavior.Really, it's just not that hard. It may be grunt work, but if you'd rather make your users waste a cumulative 25,000+ hours figuring things out, rather than you spending 100 hours of your own explaining things, I just can't have respect for your product, no matter how otherwise amazing it is.