[wp-hackers] Inline Documentation Effort was a Failure

[Otto]

On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 10:41 PM, Jacob Santos <wordpress at santosj.name> wrote:
> Reasons The Effort Failed (in my humble opinion):
> ...
> 3. You can't have majority of the core developers not adding inline
> documentation.

I believe this might be because many of the core developers do not use
a full fledged IDE for developing PHP code. This is just a guess on my
part, but a lot of the people I know who edit PHP use editors that are
essentially little more than text editors with syntax coloring.

I've recently starting using the Eclipse PDT for editing and creating
PHP projects, and find that use of full out IDEs like this makes it
not only much easier to add inline documentation, but it gives you a
valid reason to do so as well. When looking at code, having the
ability to simply put the cursor over a function call and see that
documentation pop up in a biggish tooltip is extremely handy and kind
of makes you want to document your own functions correctly.

Perhaps if the devs try using some of these sort of IDEs, some
progress can be made on this front? Having Eclipse PDT with the
Subclipse plugin to pull directly from the SVN is extremely handy and
neat to play with.

-Otto