/julia-function-docs

Repo for materials for coordinating work on improving Julia's function documentation

MIT LicenseMIT

What is This Repo?

Inspired by discussion in a Julia Discourse thread, this repo is meant to help organize community efforts to enrich Julia's function documentation.

The first call to action was at https://discourse.julialang.org/t/coordinating-community-efforts-to-enrich-function-docs/80338 and we will post follow ups in the future.

How to Contribute?

  1. Suggest functions that need more or different documentation.
  2. Participate in a pairing exercise where you either help write proposed documentation or you help read proposed documentation to provide something that is more accessible.

What Does Good Documentation Look?

Non-exhaustively, it's useful for a function to contain:

  1. Description: A 1-3 sentence summary of what the function/method does.
  2. Usage: A theoretical call to the function/method with all arguments.
  3. Arguments: A list of all arguments, their types and their meaning.
  4. Returned Values: A list of all returned values, their types and their meaning.
  5. Details: More details about how the function/method works, how it should be called, how it is implemented, how its returned values are meant to be used, etc.
  6. References: Bibliographic information
  7. See Also: Other documentation sections that are relevant and text explaining their relationship to the current function/method.
  8. Examples: Specific examples that show what using the function/method in practice would look like.