On his blog today, Alan Knowles has this new post mentioning his (and many's) bane of existence when it comes to programming - documentation.

I love good documentation, but do not love writing or maintainting it.. I'm not talking about the nice docbook manuals in PEAR or PHP, but good old reference manuals for C API's. As anyone who has worked with gtk or gnome will tell you, the semi-automated API docs that are generated for things like gtk and gnome-db, are a godsend. They frequently make the difference between taking 3 hours work to code something up, and a few days. This was one of the reasons why writing DBDO was not too complex.

He goes on mentioning a few things about automatic documentation creation, API doc parsers, and a bit of the process of documenting PHP's PDO API:

It did not take me long to realize when documenting PDO's API, that although it's design is pretty sensible, It was not really designed with exposing a public API in mind. To solve this, I ended up creating a functional wrapper around alot of these pointer method calls, following the general pattern of gobject type classes.