[ff_]

"Remove half of the signs, they become outdated whenever we change the roads"

Software is written by humans for humans, and documentation is a fundamental part of it, and needs maintenance just like the rest. It is beyond me why one would want to maintain only half of the thing and say "discard the rest"

[CipherThrowaway]

Which specific points in the post did you disagree with? "Just keep the documentation up-to-date" sounds about as practical as saying "just don't write bugs."

The impact and importance of documentation varies from project to project, but it is hard to see these hard-line takes on the importance of documentation as anything more than grandstanding. In the real world, where consumers and businesses exchange money for goods and services, and where organizations, individuals and teams must wrestle with market conditions, deadlines, KPIs and so on, documentation is a supporting act.

[pwdisswordfishc]

> "Just keep the documentation up-to-date" sounds about as practical as saying "just don't write bugs."

And that’s why nobody ever bothers with type checkers, code reviews, unit tests, CI and fuzzing in order to prevent, detect and fix bugs before shipping to production. You’re right, it’s totally impractical to apply any discipline to software development.

[CipherThrowaway]

The idea isn't "put no effort into keeping documentation up to date." It's to acknowledge that, in the real world, documentation does go out of date despite the best efforts of project maintainers. Sticking our fingers in our ears and saying "just keep it up to date then" is simply not a real position.

Despite a huge volume of tooling and methodology around reducing bugs, bugs still exist. This is a reality. One with associated costs and mitigations that we acknowledge. Likewise, the article is suggesting we acknowledge the reality that documentation does go out of date, even when effort is being put into maintaining it. That's why the point immediately preceding "It gets outdated" is "It requires maintenance" ;)

[orwin]

And that's what the post is about. To avoid writing bugs, you add type checkers, unit tests, DRY and other principles that you sometimes ignore (once you're experienced enough).

Clearly, you're talking about the same thing. TFA basically say 'to keep the documentation up to date, you need discipline, here's what I do'. Unironically, the 10th point I never thought about, and will immediately apply

[baby]

Honestly out-of-date documentation is most often better than no documentation at all

[makeitdouble]

> Remove half of the signs

This is unironically a valid approach adopted in many places. That's the basic philosophy behind putting curves and road blocks to lower driving speed instead of imperative signs that people ignore.

Or making sure there's visibility in a turn instead of putting obnoxious warning signs etc.

[ff_]

I am all for improving the conditions so that signs can be removed (and this is valid with code too, e.g. a strong type system removes the need for a lot of documentation), but again we should not advocate for not documenting things, that's just asking for trouble.

And speaking of signs, we definitely don't have a good balance there either - in some places I experienced confusing situations where adding a few more signs could have helped.

[makeitdouble]

Not to make it too much on road signs, but just plain removing signs to force drivers to think through confusing situations is a thing:

https://bigthink.com/the-present/want-less-car-accidents-get...

The same can of course apply to code: there's many instances where someone will assume they understand a tricky bit of code because they read a well written comment. That's a bad sign, as the code probably had a lot more nuance that was not covered by the commenter. And then did they properly understand what the comment is saying ? we now have a two level readability problem.

In general, I sympathize with the approach that making it easier for people to understand shouldn't happen in comments. It's frustrating for the people reading the code, but we're paid professionals, and frustration is better to me than lack of understanding or glossing over the actual behavior (I'd trade fewer bugs for hurt feelings any day)

Comments should bring additional info that complements the code in a meta way (link to bug reports, design documents, discussion threads etc.)

[baby]

This ^

Update the road and make it safe and clear to use before removing the signs. Don’t tell road builders that they can avoid placing signs because most road builders don’t build clear roads.

[jaza]

Here in New South Wales, Australia, we switched to European-style alphanumeric route numbers about 10 years ago. You can still see signs with the old-style route numbers (just numeric, and inside either a shield symbol or a hexagon symbol) in more than a handful of places around Sydney.

If you look hard enough (mainly confined to secondary rural roads these days), you can also still find signs with distances in miles. Australia switched to kilometres about 50 years ago.

So, yes, updating all the docs is hard!

[cjfd]

I am sure that people who design roads worry about distracting drivers with too many signs. In any case, when one sees five road signs in twenty meters of road, one is lucky if one of them registers. It is very unfortunate when similar worry does not occur with too many comments. It is quite possible to completely clutter out of view anything meaningful by writing too many comments.

[egeozcan]

> I am sure that people who design roads worry about distracting drivers with too many signs

I wish this was the case where I live.

You want, as a driver, the roads to be boring, as you are probably much better at recognizing patterns than reading signs.

But no, in Germany, they are busy optimizing for something I'm yet to discover (neither flow nor security, that I'm sure of) and every !! city is a new adventure with 1000 signs every corner.

[jjgreen]

When the signs say "this is a road" every 20 feet, there's not much point to them.

[ff_]

Sure, but then the advice we should give is "please please document the WHY", rather than "stop commenting"

In any case, I personally find it very useful when I come to a new piece of code to find comments that summarise what it's happening in a few words without having to parse 10-100 lines of dense implementation - I have so much cognitive ability I can apply in one day, and any effort to optimise its usage should be welcome

[vasco]

Those signs usually say the current kilometer you are on the road, which is extremely useful to report accidents or damage to the road or surrounding structures with large accuracy. This was specially relevant before everyone had a GPS receiver in their pocket, but is still useful - it's still easier for police or firefighters to go to X km on some road then to a GPS waypoint as its easier to communicate verbally and more likely that people will immediately know how to get there. Not sure about every 20feet though, different countries have different distances (every 100 meters in some).

[baby]

When the road doesn’t have a sign to say where it’s going or how fast you can go you’re ducked

[ReleaseCandidat]

I've just learned a new english word: Delineator. Maybe you should too.

[jjgreen]

No need for the snark.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[ReleaseCandidat]

That's true, sorry, I didn't want to sound that aggressive.

Let me try again: have you ever experienced the importance of delineators when driving?

[jjgreen]

Actually no, I'm a city boy and use public transport. But delineators are not what I'm talking about, rather signs which say "this is a road" every 20 feet, those don't exist since they would be entirely pointless, like comments which mirror (hopefully) the line of code that follows.

There's a thing that happens when you start coding, you put comments next to the sharp corners to remind you what it does (because your code is obscure and non-obvious, you've just started doing this), then you want it to look tidy and professional, and occasional comments look unbalanced, asymmetric, so you add comments on the obvious bits to give a nice uniform look to it. You end up with

  // say hello
  printf("This is foo (version %s)\n", VERSION);

I'm as guilty of this as everyone else. The OP is saying try to avoid that, comments have a maintenance cost.

[ReleaseCandidat]

Oh, I'm not talking about comments, but literally road signs.

I've seen plenty of these comments myself in various states of correct- and usefulness (from right and helpful to redundant to wrong, because of a change to always been wrong) in the last (almost) 20 years. Some of them had been my own.

[plastic3169]

Until it snows a lot.