What languages have the best/worst documentation and support communities?

Question

This is more to satisfy my curiousity than anything else, but what languages have the best (or worst) documentation and support communities (including IRC, mailing lists, USENET groups, websites, forums, etc)?

Answer 1

I think Sun did a good job with Javadoc and the Java APIs. I also think that the new (not sure how new it really is, but I came across it a few weeks ago) MSDN for the .NET family has a good community built around it.

Answer 2

The languages that are used the most will have the biggest support groups. More importantly, the languages used the most in open source projects.

Answer 3

You can say whatever you want about Microsoft and I'll probably agree with you, but their documentation seems to be among the best.

I also like Python's documentation, even if it's not always the most clear or thorough documentation around.

I can't think of any languages off the top of my head that have outright TERRIBLE documentation, though.

Answer 4

Back in the day the Delphi community was awesome. Unfortunately the language has died a bit, but I still haven't seen anything as good as the Delphi community.

Answer 5

I'm a Delphi user and love the language, but during my foray into WordPress and bbPress early this year, I picked up PHP, and I must say that the documention available for PHP is fantastic.

Everything is online, well organized, well edited, and always up-to-date. It is not skimpy and there are many examples.

What separates it from all the rest is that at the bottom of each page of documentation are user contributed notes. Those almost always give more good examples, situations to watch for, tricks and tips, and even some interesting discussion.

It's available in many different languages.

Because it's all online, a Google search for how to do something in PHP will invariably take you to something in the documentation.

I don't think you'll find a bigger user community than that for PHP. There's a User Group registry that lists over 422 groups in 79 countries, and there's always major PHP conferences going on worldwide.

Answer 6

Not exactly a language, but I've found that the Qt framework for C++ generally has some great documentation. They not only have class/function definitions, but they also have descriptions and useful information about the classes/functions.

I've also found python documentation to be pretty good.