Minimalist Documentation of Frameworks

Programmers are like most other humans they prefer to act rather than read. In the context of application frameworks, this means that a programmer is more inclined to “try it out” than to read its manual. Rather than trying to instruct programmers to stop this all too human habit, this paper examine ways in which documentation can be organized so that a programmer is supported in learning through doing rather than learning through reading. The programmer is most open to study documentation during a breakdown of his understanding of the framework, and must in that case be led to the appropriate pieces of documentation. In the context of a concrete framework, the paper discusses how reference material, tutorial and run-time error messages and warnings are combined into a hypertext-based documentation of frameworks.