Question for my #PHP friends. When was the last time you actually used phpDocumentor or a similar documentation generation tool?
It's been more than a decade for me. Literally everything is in my IDE, via code completion or popups. I don't know what a doc generator would even do for me anymore.
Are they still useful in some way I'm not realizing?
As part of ongoing maintenance of the CI toolchain, I recently made sure that phpdoc generated docs are made available as build artifacts on github as well as browseable online, for php libraries I maintain. I am not sure how many users would prefer those over the IDE inspecting the downloaded code though...
I could look at pageviews and download stats of code vs. docs, but in the day and age of composer and ci tools it feels futile - the number of developers using their ide for code docs will remain largely unknown.
That, and my libraries are all very low traffic, and probably skew towards old-timers / notepad-loving developers 😄
Larry Garfield
gggeek