cod: An Unassuming Documentation Generator

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The software world is a complex, dynamic mess.

In the face of chaos, the modern programmer has learned to embrace adaptability over stability.

As a result, innovative new languages with entire ecosystems of libraries seem to form overnight, while powerful tools and services dramatically simplify our development process.

And yet, the dream of the ‘90s is still alive in our documentation tools.

Consider – just as an example – JavaScript: JSDoc and YUIdoc are two of the most popular documentation-generators available.

Both of them have a limited set of accepted @tags, which are heavily inspired by monolithic tools like doxygen. These aim to be all-in-one solutions for generating human-readable API docs, usually static HTML/CSS/JS.

But JavaScript is nothing like the classical languages those tools were designed for, and monolithic tools do not mix with the modular...