target: index.html.md

title: "Lade: Language-agnostic Documentation Extractor"

Lade

Lade is a language-agnostic documentation extractor.

It extracts documentation from source code in any programming language.

It facilitates:

• maintaining documentation close to the relevant source code
• documentation-driven development -- growing implementation from documentation, and vice-versa
• producing different sets of documentation for different audiences -- users concerned with a program's UIs, developers concerned with its APIs, and contributors concerned with its internals.

User Guide

Refer to the user guide.

Contributor Guide

Refer to the contributor guide.

Maintainers

Lade is maintained by Matt McClure.

History

Lade is derived from Ian MacLeod's Groc. Lade is the result of taking groc apart and putting it back together again. What remains is the essence of documentation extraction, without groc's rendering and publishing capabilities.

Groc was heavily influenced by Jeremy Ashkenas' docco. It was an attempt to further enhance the idea (thus, groc couldn't tout the same quick 'n dirty principles of docco).

Known Issues

• Relative links in README.md only work in Slate-rendered documentation. Refer to http://matthewlmcclure.github.io/lade.
• Lade's own documentation produces many small partial Markdown files. It seems more desirable that it could assemble fragments from many places in the source code into a given Markdown file so that the resulting extracted documentation could be used easily without rendering it with Slate.