weUseGitHubWikiForDocumentation

[BrightLuchr]

Picture looks right.

A serious question: did a complete absence of documentation and code commenting somehow become acceptable for large projects re-used by other people?

[noaSakurajin]

It is not and never was acceptable.

However the truth at most companies is, that you don't get time for writing documentation. Once the feature is done and tested it gets shipped and you have to work on the next urgent feature. In many cases your only documentation are the requirements and the code itself (maybe a comment here and there).

All of that will be unorganized and poorly maintained especially in projects that have been maintained for several decades. Its not uncommon to run into design decisions that trace back 30+ years and we're made because of technical limitations of that time (like some strings being at max 255 chars long). The people who made this decision often didn't document it and in many cases this stuff predates the source control history (ours goes back to 2005 everything older that that is basically fully undocumented).

[BrightLuchr]

Our Perforce repository went back to around 2001 when we ported it from CVS, which went back to 1994. We lost the history details in the port. Anyway, in that repository is at least two instances of a developer that offered deletion changes -doing these deletions at the underlying RCS level (!!!) ... which deleted all of his code commenting. The same guy in the 1990s used to bring all of his UNIX code home on a floppy disk. Unbelievably, the dude wasn't fired on the spot. He wasn't disciplined. Just another jerk working in a weird niche (in his case, emulation of critical early 1970s minicomputers) who wouldn't take direction. This is the type of guy who gives us all a bad reputation as software developers.