Better documentation is a non-trivial example application that, one, exercises all "normal" uses of the API, and, two, shows what the API developers consider to be best practices, all the way through.
Let me into your minds. Show me how you think I think. If you don't know how the people consuming your API think, your API is going to be pretty bogus. If your way of thinking is inimical to me, fine and dandy. Just give me a reasonable way to find out which isn't reading hundreds of pages of Javadoc or similar.
And if the example contains copy-and-pastable code, or reusable functions, so much the better. Make the licenses align, even if the code which implements the API is fully proprietary, and things will work out just fine.
Oh, and if you can't keep your example code working, that says something I need to know, too. Something nasty.
Let me into your minds. Show me how you think I think. If you don't know how the people consuming your API think, your API is going to be pretty bogus. If your way of thinking is inimical to me, fine and dandy. Just give me a reasonable way to find out which isn't reading hundreds of pages of Javadoc or similar.
And if the example contains copy-and-pastable code, or reusable functions, so much the better. Make the licenses align, even if the code which implements the API is fully proprietary, and things will work out just fine.
Oh, and if you can't keep your example code working, that says something I need to know, too. Something nasty.