JSDoc VS docco

You may like JSDoc[1] if you just want some type-safety from the IDE without the compilation overhead.

It’s done wonders when I’ve had to wrangle poorly commented legacy JavaScript codebases where most of the overhead is tracing what type the input parameters are.

Personally, I’m impartial to TypeScript or JSDoc at this point. But I’d rather have either over plain JavaScript.

[1] https://jsdoc.app/

I wholeheartedly agree. At most, I introduce JSDoc[1] to newer developers as standardising how parameters and whatnot are commented at least gets you better documentation and _some_ safety without adding any TS knowledge overhead.

[1] https://jsdoc.app/

This is where JSDoc comes to save the day.

The best way to do this, of course, is with JSDoc. But something I always found awkward about jsdoc is defining the object types in the same file. So, after a lot of reading, I found a way to combine JSDoc with declaration type files from Typescript. Let me give you an example:

There is a lot of specific symbols presented on the JSDOC specification that can be found here: https://jsdoc.app

JSDoc is a specification for the comment format in JavaScript. This specification allows developers to describe the structure of their code, data types, function parameters, and much more using special comments. These comments can then be transformed into documentation using appropriate tools.

Working with new features, frameworks, and tools, the experience of reading documentation is a critical part of it. I have been lucky to work with projects that feature really easy to read documentation such as USWDS and Bun, but I've also had the misfortune to work with pretty terrible documentation like JSDoc. The JSDoc documentation lacks a search field which makes searching for specific items an ordeal and also does not cover many hidden use cases. It provides less than the bare minimum for what it needs to do - a lot of the time I am forced to rely on external user documentation elsewhere to use JSDoc effectively. That was why I was drawn to the search field in particular in Docusaurus.

The Svelte team followed suit but motivated by the maintainer's developer experience as they migrated the project away from TypeScript in favor of plain JSDoc comments for type annotations instead.

Even more relevant, tools like Javadoc, JSDoc, Doxygen, etc. read comments in a specific format to generate documentation. These comments do not affect readability. On the contrary, Javadocs are great for explaining how to use these entities. Combined with tools like my dear Doctest, we even get guarantees of accuracy and correctness!

Document types with JSDoc annotations

i have seen those in annotated javascript documentation. but it was the other way around. (comment on the left, and code on the right).

they all seem to use docco[0] with the option to display comment in "parallel". the author of docco used it in their library underscore[1].

[0]: https://github.com/jashkenas/docco

Side note - it's been a while since i've seen a Docco-style annotated-source-style documentation! http://ashkenas.com/docco/

Backbone.js was the first time i saw it, and I loved it! https://backbonejs.org/docs/backbone.html It demonstrated to me that the libraries I use are just normal code that other people write, and i myself can read it to understand a problem.

jashkenas/docco - Literate Programming can be Quick and Dirty.