I Analyzed the Readability of 10 Popular Developer Documentation Sites

Good documentation is worth nothing if developers can't read it. I ran 10 popular developer docs pages through standard readability formulas—Flesch-Kincaid, Flesch Reading Ease, Gunning Fog—to see which ones actually write at a level humans can parse. The results were more consistent than I expected, with one glaring outlier. The Methodology Three formulas, all derived from word length and sentence length: Flesch Reading Ease : 0–100 scale, higher is easier. 60–70 is considered standard/plain English. Anything below 30 is classified as very difficult (think academic journals or legal contracts). Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level : Maps to US school grade levels. Grade 8 means an 8th grader can read it. Grade 12+ starts getting into college territory. Gunning Fog Index : Similar grade-level metric, but also accounts for complex words (3+ syllables). Higher Fog = more jargon-dense text. I fetched each page with requests, stripped code blocks, navigation, headers, footers, and sidebars with Beau