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by lhnz
4962 days ago
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It's better to make a mistake in your thought process that can be caught by reading plain english than to write the code and realise the logic is wrong. However, I agree that comments that are completely banal should be removed in place of more interesting ones about the design decisions, performance characteristics, etc. (I however do start by writing comments explaining exactly the code I am about to create as I like to spot higher-level problems as early as possible.) >> I saw fewer lines of comments until a fresh, new young team member joined Young programmers and Knuth[0]. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming |
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However literate programming isn't about commenting your source. It's about explaining your program in plain human language and presenting it in an almost essay style. A special program is run on your "literate" source which translates it to a set of source files that your compiler understands. It is not about writing verbose and excessive comments in your source code.
I don't mind if your approach is to write out pseudo-code or comments or what-have-you. My problem was that checking this stuff into the code-base wasn't a good idea. I don't suspect I changed the minds of the people I had to work with but they did remove the excess comments from the code before checking it in. That made reviewing their code much easier.