well, consider the ruby language: it is implementation-defined(!).
i got a Rails job without knowing any of Ruby beforehand (and the other party was aware of this). i made myself comfortable in the office and asked: so where's the Ruby manual? they said, "ruby-doc.org". "that's just the API docs, where's the language reference?" i asked. "there's none. maybe you could use the Bison grammar from the MRI source..." "???"
Even in this thread people suggested to write documentation straight there. It is an extremely worrying trend.
> how has any webdeveloper has managed to stay sane during the last decade
Did any of them really manage to stay sane?
Last time I looked at it I could not find a printable PDF reference. Is it possible to generate one?
My quality threshold for documentation was always set very high, because I started my career with VMS. And DEC always had that obsession with comprehensive, concise and clean documentation on every tiniest bit they're exposing.
You could try looking at the source code of the documentation[1]. It uses PHP to render the site, although the actual documentation of the API is XML[2]
[0] https://processing.org/reference/
[1] https://github.com/processing/processing-docs
[2] https://github.com/processing/processing-docs/tree/master/co...
Who needs documentation if we have Stack Overflow? /s
Seriously, I had to learn React for my new job (not a web dev by trade), and while I don't dislike the framework (a compliment in programming land), a lot of times I had to resort to Stack Overflow for information that should have been provided by the documentation; which instead assumed I already understood how React worked, or forgot to mention that things were different in ES6, or mentioned that things were different but wasn't clear about how.
The worst part is that when I complained about this to my friends they said "oh, React is one of the better documented frameworks out there". At that point I honestly wondered how has any webdeveloper has managed to stay sane during the last decade.
As for fun coding with good documentation, I suggest Processing:
https://processing.org/
.. good luck using that professionally though, unless you get paid for creating interactive art.