24 Nov
2011
24 Nov
'11
4:27 p.m.
On 24/11/11 5:17 PM, Richard wrote:
In article<539CFBE84C931A4E8516F3BBEA36C7AA039882
at 505MBX1.corp.vnw.com>,
Rich Alderson<RichA at vulcan.com> writes:
Apart from those who write crystalline pearls of clarity which work
forever and never need to be touched again, the vast bulk of code spends
most of its life in maintenance, and that rarely by the people who wrote
it. (Hmmmm and have you tested that your code is "readable and
understandable" to those who come later? Do they agree? What about the
rationales for methods that simply aren't visible in the code?)
If you don't comment it, do you at least document it?
Doxygen/Javadoc/whatever would be better than nothing, to maintainers.
Apart from the apparently controversial commenting "question", "The
Elements of Programming Style" (op. cit.) deals thoroughly with issues
of readability and comprehension in any language.
--T
From: Charlie Carothers
Sent: Tuesday, November 22, 2011 11:18 PM
Then it was completely lost on the audience (including me).
See<http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ToNeedComments> for why I hardly write
comments anymore and still have readable and understandable code. Maybe what software development really needs is a
language where the
comments *are* the code?
...and we come full circle.
*That* was Knuth's point in creating Literate Programming.