> That’s not why they code, nor are the skills of writing good documentation even vaguely similar to those for writing good code.
Strong disagree on that one. Writing good code is all communication - with the computer, with your colleagues, with your future self who doesn't remember how or why you did something. It's written knowledge transfer. Blocks of code, just like paragraphs of documentation, need to both fit into a whole, and be as accessible as possible on their own to someone jumping straight into them (e.g. someone straight from google, someone jumping in to do a quick bugfix or merge fix). The list goes on and on.
Strong disagree on that one. Writing good code is all communication - with the computer, with your colleagues, with your future self who doesn't remember how or why you did something. It's written knowledge transfer. Blocks of code, just like paragraphs of documentation, need to both fit into a whole, and be as accessible as possible on their own to someone jumping straight into them (e.g. someone straight from google, someone jumping in to do a quick bugfix or merge fix). The list goes on and on.