This morning’s short read is “5 Types of Comments to Avoid Making in Your Code“. No developer doubts the benefit of good comments, but when the signal-to-noise ratio tips in favor of noise, productivity can actually be hindered. I know I’m guilty of using at least one of these forbidden comment types in my code, but
//TODO: finish this blog post
Haha, um, so I read that as well as the “stop commenting your code” article. I can’t say that I agree. As a Schemer, I used to be a big “no comments” kind of programmer. In fact, I thought they were really useless. I’ve since turned around my thinking on this. While it’s not a popular decision with me and the Scheme community, I’m a big fan of Literate Programming, and more particularly, in Hygienic Literate Programming, which I “invented.”
I’d like to give you a counter example. Instead of writing programs, why not write Essays? Here’s a program I recently wrote: http://www.sacrideo.us/~arcfide/tmp/libarchive.pdf .
Oh! Have you read the book “Coders at Work?” I got my hands on it and it’s really interesting to see what some of the most famous programmers around have to say about commenting.
I have several of the “… At Work” books — they are all excellent. I started “Founders at Work”, and “Coders” is next on my list. After about a bazillion other books I need to finish. But yeah, I love books like that. Have you read Paul Graham’s book “Hacker’s and Painters”?
I really like everyone’s opinions of Knuth, and especially Guy Steele’s and Ken Thompson’s. I also love the fact that I can order it online and get the PDF, which suited me particularly well for this book.
I haven’t read Hacker’s and Painters, but I guess I should.
I still need to read through TAoCP. 