David Abrahams wrote: "Andy Little" [1]<andy@servocomm.freeserve.co.uk> writes: "David Maisonave" wrote What's the point of creating a great class, if only a handfull of developers ues it, because the majority have no idea how to use it? You cant escape the fact that writing documentation is the most tedious, rotten , boring, miserable, mind-numbing job imaginable ***. I disagree. Finding the right way to explain something deepens one's own understanding of it and -- very often -- uncovers real problems with the design. I think the skills required are really essential to becoming a great software designer. If you give it the time it deserves and treat it as part of the process rather than just something to do after you've written the code, it can even be enjoyable. I agree, though I was dragged kicking and screaming into agreement by experiences of the past few years. It's one thing to explain a design to other people who are already familiar with the topic (but not intimately so), but explaining how to use a functional language interpreter to someone whose programming expertise has been on-the-fly gawk scripting... the design of both the language and the interpreter has to become far more elegant than if I were explaining it to another person with my background. (Just try explaining to someone who's used to Perl/gawk why the new script language has no variables.) In fact I find consistently that if a design is elegant, then it's far more enjoyable to have explained it - whether in a TeX file or verbally - and the act of explaining forces me into knowing the topic better than before. (ObPhilo: I think that's because there's something that intrinsically beautiful about asymptotically exact invariant observations - I mean "good design".) As a novice to Boost, I'd offer to help out with the documentation except that not only are the next 6 to 8 weeks are bad timing for starting any projects like this, but I'm also notoriously slow at generating documentation. I'll keep an eye on this thread though, and if things resolve themselves favorably for me then I could see myself offering to help. References 1. mailto:andy@servocomm.freeserve.co.uk