Anyway one time after a workshop for some r package at a conference, one of the instructors was bemoaning how few people actually seemed interested in learning everything the package could do or understanding really how it worked and i could not get him to understand that they were ecologists who did not care about the insides of computers they just wanted to know how many weird plants there were at their site and when climate change would kill them and they had no more interest in how the computer works than one does in the mining and smelting of the metal in the trowel one is using to plant sunflowers. It is perhaps interesting, but utterly irrelevant to one’s goals.

Which is to say that i think documentation is better if it’s front loaded with lots of recipes rather than explaining every technique and ingredient in fine detail and expecting users to figure out how to cook from there.