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by tehologist 606 days ago
All source code is self documenting, source code is for developers to read. Computer languages are a human readable version of what the compiler executes and is for the developers, not the compilers benefit. As a developer, I read way more software than I write and if the source is hard to understand then I feel you failed as a developer. Writing is a skill, no less important in software than anywhere else. Properly named functions/variables and easy to follow flow control is a skill that takes years to learn. All developers should keep a thesaurus and a dictionary nearby. If you find yourself writing a lot of comments trying to explain what you are doing in your code, then you probably should refactor.