Conversation

my biggest issue with the vast majority of PL APIs is discoverability. for the most part, they work best if you literally skim every class/type/function/method/module you can and just... know them. then there's Hoogle, which says "dream of a type and I shall provide a function."
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hands-down, Hoogle is the most impressive documentation resource I've ever found. I look at the types of data I've found myself with, mash in some arrows, and Hoogle says "someone implemented a library that does exactly what you want". it's glorious. every PL needs a Hoogle.
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these thoughts brought to you by "I have a Vec and I'm sure there's a way to delete all its contents. delete_all? no, doesn't exist. drop? ah, that's a destructor. uhhh empty? destroy? clear? oh, it's clear! nice."
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(admittedly I do not know by what type signature I could ever find this function, unless side-effects were encoded efficiently in the types. but it made me think about how much I love using Hoogle to find functions/operators when writing Haskell.)
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IMO there's a ton of low hanging fruit in UI design for auto-generated docs. Here's a mockup I did for Rustdoc to address this exact issue:
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