Improving documentation for Plutus Developers

[Benjmhart]

Currently, effective usage of Plutus in production pretty much requires reading of the Plutus specification and the extended EUTXO model. However these documents are not necessarily optimized for quick-reference in the ways a programmer may need, they're really intended for implementors and early integrations.

Additionally, a developer using Plutus will typically also make use of Haddock Generated documentation available for the Plutus Library or other related tool in Haskell.

This leaves a number of deficiencies in documentation:

• documentation should be searchable and discoverable through means that are convenient for developers (example: MDN
• users of alternative languages will often need to cross-check for specific parts of the plutus API (such as scriptcontext) - perhaps something akin to internationalization can be supplied in documentation to have equivalent code examples in multiple languages

[Benjmhart]

IOG has recently set up two technical writers IIRC MLabs has also recently been awarded a catalyst grant on this topic.

[zliu41]

My 2c:

For Plutus Tx: (1) we have a technical writer working on improving the Plutus readthedocs, which includes a Plutus Tx tutorial; (2) we have plans to publish Haddock for Plutus Tx library, but it's not currently on our roadmap.

For other source languages, I'd expect their respective maintainers to provide documentation, quick references and code examples.

For Plutus Core, it is mainly the compiler developers who need to have a detailed understanding of it, and they should indeed read and thoroughly understand the specification.

[aleeusgr]

see also documentation wishlist: #37