Your docs are a program - Zainab Ali | Lambda Days

[CodeSync]

Your docs are a program - Zainab Ali | Lambda Days 2025

Your docs are a program - Zainab Ali | Lambda Days 2025

This talk was recorded at Lambda Days in June 2025. If you’re curious about our upcoming event, check https://lambdadays.org

Your docs are a program

When programming, documentation typically takes a back seat to development. There are good reasons for this: docs are hard to maintain, as well as write, and the tools for working with them can be painful. But writing documentation is very similar to writing code: it’s just that we don’t have a great language for it yet. This talk posits that docs are programs. If so, what does their ideal programming language look like? To address this, we treat documentation as an artefact produced by compilation. Like a programming pipeline, a doc pipeline has phases, symbols and errors, but that it also has unique concerns around structure and flow.

In the search for our ideal language, we’ll explore Pollen in Racket, Elixir Livebooks, mdoc and Laika in Scala, and see how these tools influence our experience. At the end, we’ll have a vision of what writing docs could be. You might not enjoy writing docs, but you’ll improve your workflow and even be inspired to develop your own doc tooling.

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