YARD VS JSDoc

JSDOC is a predefined method of documenting code for javascript ecosystem created in 1999 that works similar to libraries for other languages such as: Javadoc for java, YARD for ruby, etc..

In addition to project documentation, you've included a lot of code comments. You could adopt a standardized format and use it to generate API documentation. RDoc and YARD are two options. If I were reviewing this code at work, I would probably ask you to remove comments that explain what, not why.

I still just document everything using YARD and focus on designing really obvious Object Models and of course write tests. I have tried using sord to convert my YARD type annotations to RBS or RBI, but you still have to fill in missing bits, then use steep and somehow load in RBS/RBI files for other gems and stdlib, and it's just an uphill battle since Ruby is dynamically typed by default. Obviously Dynamic Typing lends itself more to Dynamic Languages, where you can call an arbitrary method and let the language VM figure it out at runtime. Static or Strong Typing lends itself better to compiled languages where everything needs to be resolved at compile time and converted into object code. If I need to work in a compiled language, then I'll use Crystal, which also supports type inference. TypeScript's type syntax is quite nice, but I tend to avoid writing massive JavaScript code bases where a Type Checker helps catch subtle bugs, and instead prefer sticking to minimal amounts of vanilla JavaScriot in order to keep complexity low and not overwhelm the browser.

I had a dig into the file history, and it looks like we have to go back to 0.7 to find the old tag list. Here we find the info we need to understand the intent of the @option tag:

YARD: http://yardoc.org/

I tend to follow along using the YardDoc comment style. It has many small things I love about it; an example is when yardoc is followed it can be used to generate RBS/Sorbet type files with the sord gem, you can also generate application documents similar to rdoc/sdoc.

That turns out to be a pretty common use case for markdown. Github, for example, renders your README.md is part of a git repo's "home" page. It's also common to have tooling that parses specially formatted comments in your source code and produce a documentation bundle, usually as a web page (ex. RDoc, YARD, JSDoc, etc.).

My first assumption was, that I should be able to generate markdown from the source. Same ruby and rails does now, but only tweaking a couple of parameters to generate .md files instead. YARD is being used for that and it supports any markup rdoc or yard.

I’ve long used the YARD format and chose to use that as my documentation syntax. I suppose I didn’t check with anyone on this decision and slowly started adding documentation. I want to use this post to synthesize my implicit decision and the benefits of using Yard as the documentation format.

That said, YARD is a ruby documentation tool that has a yard graph command you can use to dump a UML graph for your app into a .dot file, which can be used with lots of different graphing tools (usually graphviz but there are a bunch of online tools and open source projects that can visualize them for you).

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

📚 JSDoc for documentation and jsdoc-to-markdown to create docs as markdown files