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So many comments already... Well, that's to be expected. I agree with OP wholeheartedly, but I think he misses one obvious thing and that is the fact that commenting code is hard. Very, very hard, laborious and easy to get wrong. It hard even for people who are used to writing prose, like heavy bloggers for example. It's made even harder if you don't write in your native language, and "even harder" here means "almost impossible for many". Unlike many programmers I enjoy writing, which should be visible to anyone who sees my comments here. I have quite a lot of background in writing various texts, from short stories to essays. Yet I find commenting - or rather - writing good comments in code very difficult. I think I can do this, I got praised for the comments at one time or another, mainly for their clarity (instead of sheer volume) which makes me extremely proud, but the fact is that I spend almost as much time on commenting the code as on writing it... Sometimes I write comments up front along with tests, to clarify my thoughts, sometimes I write them after coding something, but that does not change the difficulty at all. I think the art of commenting code - and it is an art, no doubt about it - is comparable with debugging. As we all know, debugging something is twice as hard as coding it, so - by definition - if you code something to be as clever as you can you won't be able to debug it. Nor comment it properly. And many of comments such as "I'm against commenting code" stems from this, I think - in many cases we're forced (in school, mostly) to code near the limit of our ability and then we're forced to comment; of course those comments are crap, but that's what we see for a very long time. Then we get used to it, we kind of expect comments to suck, and we think that they are a waste of time. Not so. They are just very, very hard to master and there are very few people who would even try to teach about them. We can say whatever we want, but it won't change anything. We need to find those who really can write good comments and make them teach others... After all this I have to admit that I doubt it's possible. Don Knuth tried with his "literate programming" idea and failed miserably. Among 25 programmers at my current work just one even knew the term, but didn't know any specifics, while all of them know who Knuth was. I don't mean to say it's hopeless... But it certainly seems like that to me. |