I don't disagree that public APIs should be well documented. However, I believe it's very easy to forget to update the comments. Especially in scripting languages without type safety. There is little to remind the programmer that arguments were added, types were changed, argument order was modified, behavior was changed, return value was changed, locking behavior was changed, memory allocations were changed, etc. Obviously unit tests should help catch many of these changes. However, it's still up to the coder to remember to change the comments. When you're behind on a deadline or you're juggling 50 different API changes because you're still alpha I'd say it's pretty easy to forget to update a comment.
See http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.ajax/ if you want an example of on API that could easily have a few typos in it. Who is checking to make sure it's 100% in sync with the code 100% of the time? Not trying to say this example has bugs in the docs but there's a LOT of behavior described that could be out of date.
See http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.ajax/ if you want an example of on API that could easily have a few typos in it. Who is checking to make sure it's 100% in sync with the code 100% of the time? Not trying to say this example has bugs in the docs but there's a LOT of behavior described that could be out of date.