Quote from: coinrevo on December 30, 2013, 11:47:04 PM

The whole point of protocols is to get software independent descriptions, so that software can communicate over networks independently. At least that is how it works for TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP, HTML, SMTP, ECMAScript and so on. It seems Bitcoin as a network has quite a different relationship to protocols. After all the consensus build around the software, and protocols are essentially enforced consensus. At any rate, the view that bitcoind source should be the documentation is not very helpful for the future development of the network. And to say there should be no good documentation doesn't really hold up in argument. One could argue that Bitcoin should be the best documented piece of software on the planet.

Well, the reality is that we're forced to reverse-engineer the specs as with most software since it unfortunately wasn't pre-engineered by a liability-hardened steering committee but rather evolved from a buggy ad-hoc pseudonymous side project by a few volunteers.

Most of the topical work has been done, but we're left with edge-cases and idiosyncrasies and arbitrary implementation details with a high cost for reimplementing it wrong.

But what's new?

If anybody really cared to ever tune up the state of documentation in software projects, then documentation wouldn't be persistently relegated to a thankless chore dependent on the goodwill gruntwork of the few volunteers capable of writing it.