It is how PHP survived (at least in the 4.x.x and early 5.x.x days when I last used it) the massively inconsistent "standard" library: the documentation reduced the effect of that problem considerably and made discovery of features relatively easy.
A "good enough" system with excellent documentation is going to win out against a better system without the doc documentation to make library feature discovery and use easy.
It'll be interesting to see how node.js develops in this regard. Currently the core documentation is pretty good there, but as the size of the project grows it'll take effort to maintain a certain standard and coverage.
Comments
It is how PHP survived (at least in the 4.x.x and early 5.x.x days when I last used it) the massively inconsistent "standard" library: the documentation reduced the effect of that problem considerably and made discovery of features relatively easy.
A "good enough" system with excellent documentation is going to win out against a better system without the doc documentation to make library feature discovery and use easy.
It'll be interesting to see how node.js develops in this regard. Currently the core documentation is pretty good there, but as the size of the project grows it'll take effort to maintain a certain standard and coverage.