pdoc VS pre-commit

You can also use doc-strings to generate automated documentation for your code using a library like pdoc. Consider the following example from Stack-Scraper and the corresponding documentation generated using pdoc library.

I’ve used sphinx extensively and though it is one of the standards and does a ton, I do not like or recommend it. Personally, I realllly like pdoc for its simplicity. Do not confused pdoc with pdoc3

RE browser vs reading the code: sounds like you have a nicer setup than my neovim setup. Although I think my first point still holds unless CLion handles that case too.

With respect to the rest of your comment, indeed, those are issues. Although I think I take issue with you pinning this on rustdoc. I actually think it's a dance between documentation presentation (so, rustdoc), API design and familiarity with the language.

I've long said that rustdoc makes unknown unknowns difficult to discover, and this is particularly painful for folks new to Rust. Because you don't really know what to look for yet. And writing docs is a difficult exercise in perspective taking, where you need to balance what you think others know. If you assume they know too little, it's not hard to end up writing too much and adding a fair bit of noise. With that said, I agree that "too little docs" is a far more common problem than "too many docs."

But yeah, your experience is a perfect example of what I mean when I say "generics complicate APIs." They introduce indirection everywhere, and I'm not sure how much rustdoc can really help with that. You might be right that maybe there are some visualizations that can be added, but like you, I've always seen those as gimmicks in other tools that are rarely useful. IMO, a heavily generic API really requires the crate author to write more prose about how their APIs are intended to be used with lots of concrete examples.

The interesting bit here is that I've personally found the documentation experience in Rust to be far far better than any other ecosystem. All the way from writing docs up to consuming them. I've sampled many different ecosystems (C, C++, Haskell, Python, Go to name some) and other than maybe Go, I thought the doc experience was really just not great in any of them. Python specifically seems to be a case where I tend to see a lot of variance in opinion. I hated Sphinx so much, for example, that I built an alternative.[1] I also just generally dislike the output that Sphinx produces. I find that it lacks structure, and I've always had a hard time navigating my way through Python library docs.

[1]: https://github.com/mitmproxy/pdoc

Anyway, this is all my opinion. And a lot of it is based on reflecting on my own experience. I have no idea how well it generalizes. I have given this topic a lot of thought though, and have even written documentation generators for other ecosystems because I thought the other choices were bad enough to warrant spending a few weeks on such a tool.

Documentation is now generated using pdoc https://pdoc.dev. Thanks Dliwk!! (I'll get it wired up to auto-update to a webpage soon).

There's a comprehensive README.md with installation and Quickstart information on GitHub, and reference documentation (auto generated by pdoc) on GitHub Pages.

Our main docs are built with Hugo (https://github.com/mitmproxy/mitmproxy/tree/main/docs). For our API docs we use pdoc (https://pdoc.dev), which integrates well with most static site generators. pdoc is also maintained by us. :)

PEP 257 and a few others define "docstrings". Leverage them to make full use of autodoc tools. pdoc is a pretty fun tool that "just works". Build good habits from the start. Projects that have great documentation are just more attractive to me. If I come across a project that seems to do what I need, but has crappy documentation, I keep looking.

Hi HN! Some of you may remember @BurntSushi's pdoc tool, a lightweight alternative to Sphinx. We're a bit in an unfortunate situation with a hostile work assuming our name [1], but I figured that we shouldn't give in and continue the legacy of that tool. Long story short, we have just published a major new "modern Python 3" release, which hopefully makes pdoc a really compelling option again. :-)

[1] https://github.com/mitmproxy/pdoc#pdoc-vs-pdoc3

Today we are going to look at how to setup Black (a python code formatter) and pre-commit (a package for handling git hooks in python) to automatically format you code on commit.

# See https://pre-commit.com for more information # See https://pre-commit.com/hooks.html for more hooks repos: - repo: https://github.com/pre-commit/pre-commit-hooks rev: v3.2.0 hooks: - id: trailing-whitespace - id: end-of-file-fixer - id: check-yaml - id: check-toml - id: check-added-large-files - repo: local hooks: - id: tox lint name: tox-validation entry: pdm run tox -e test,lint language: system files: ^src\/.+py$|pyproject.toml|^tests\/.+py$ types_or: [python, toml] pass_filenames: false - id: tox docs name: tox-docs language: system entry: pdm run tox -e docs types_or: [python, rst, toml] files: ^src\/.+py$|pyproject.toml|^docs\/ pass_filenames: false - repo: https://github.com/pdm-project/pdm rev: 2.10.4 # a PDM release exposing the hook hooks: - id: pdm-lock-check - repo: https://github.com/jumanjihouse/pre-commit-hooks rev: 3.0.0 hooks: - id: markdownlint

Pre-commit hooks act as the first line of defense in maintaining code quality, seamlessly integrating with linters and code formatters. They automatically execute these tools each time a developer tries to commit code to the repository, ensuring the code adheres to the project's standards. If the hooks detect issues, the commit is paused until the issues are resolved, guaranteeing that only code meeting quality standards makes it into the repository.

Pre-commit Hooks: Pre-commit is a tool that can be set up to enforce coding rules and standards before you commit your changes to your code repository. This ensures that you can't even check in (commit) code that doesn't meet your standards. This allows a code reviewer to focus on the architecture of a change while not wasting time with trivial style nitpicks.

Ah, fair enough!

On my team we use pre-commit[0] a lot. I guess I would define the history to be something like "has this commit ever been run through our pre-commit hooks?". If you rewrite history, you'll (usually) produce commits that have not been through pre-commit (and they've therefore dodged a lot of static checks that might catch code that wasn't working, at that point in time). That gives some manner of objectivity to the "history", although it does depend on each user having their pre-commit hooks activated in their local workspace.

[0]: https://pre-commit.com/

Pre-commit is a framework for managing and maintaining multi-language pre-commit hooks. It supports hooks for various programming languages. Using this framework, you only have to specify a list of hooks you want to run before every commit, and pre-commit handles the installation and execution of those hooks despite your project’s primary language.

You can learn more here: pre-commit.com

Note this includes support for pre-commit.

As a nice next step, you could also add mypy to check your type hints are consistent, and automate running all this via pre-commit hooks set up with… pre-commit.