You are aware that Confluence is a company specific, and proprietary, reinvention of a wheel (wikis)? And it's not even a particularly good one. It's mainly popular because it gets bundled with Jira by Atlassian. People use it because it is there; not because it is particularly good at what it does.
Your central thesis is that code and documentation are two very different things. Donald Knuth, who knows a thing or two about writing both documentation and code, invented literate programming because he disagrees with that. The key point of literate programming is that writing good code is a form of documenting your thought process for the benefit of other programmers who may have to maintain and understand your code.
Confluence is part of the reason I run an Atlassian free company. I've never been impressed with Atlassian tooling. Most of the tools I use instead support things like Markdown and some other sane things. It's fine as a poor man's word processor but it's a bit of a straight jacket. Don't get me started on Jira.
> You are aware that Confluence is a company specific, and proprietary, reinvention of a wheel (wikis)?
Am I aware that Confluence is a product created by a company for a profit in order to provide an advanced implementation of a design for specific use cases? Yes.
> And it's not even a particularly good one.
I have used 20 different wikis. None of them provide all Confluence's features or are nearly as user-friendly. Very few of them provide a robust API. Very few of them have as seamless a WYSIWYG, not to mention native Markdown support. Very few of them have advanced management capabilities. None of them have as many advanced dynamic content features, very few of them have marketplaces. It is hands-down the best tool for what it is designed for.
> Donald Knuth, who knows a thing or two about writing both documentation and code, invented literate programming because he disagrees with that.
Literate programming is ridiculous. The idea is to use a human language to tell a story and have that story be converted into computer code, with the idea that the human will understand the story better and somehow this will result in them being able to write better code. But that's stupid for two reasons: 1) writing a story is hard. communication is hard. most people just suck at it. the idea that a human will be automatically good at telling a story is in itself ridiculous. 2) humans just suck at writing code, no matter how well they understand its purpose. Traditional architecture is intended to formalize the purpose and function of the program and can result in perfectly adequate code, assuming the human actually learns how to do their job properly, which I admit is a pretty big ask for most people in tech today.
If you don't like Confluence and Jira it's probably because you haven't learned how to use them (or you just don't like that they're not free). They are incredibly flexible and extensible and the marketplace is full of tools to expand their functionality, even though the base functionality is already very powerful.
Your central thesis is that code and documentation are two very different things. Donald Knuth, who knows a thing or two about writing both documentation and code, invented literate programming because he disagrees with that. The key point of literate programming is that writing good code is a form of documenting your thought process for the benefit of other programmers who may have to maintain and understand your code.
Confluence is part of the reason I run an Atlassian free company. I've never been impressed with Atlassian tooling. Most of the tools I use instead support things like Markdown and some other sane things. It's fine as a poor man's word processor but it's a bit of a straight jacket. Don't get me started on Jira.