From: Tim Hunter <cyclists@...>
Date: 2005-01-16T03:01:12+09:00
Subject: Re: why dosn't ruby support  // to comment?

Alexey Verkhovsky wrote:

> Tim Hunter wrote:
> 
>>One thing that
>>stands out is a noticeable lack of anything resembling a comment.
>>  
>>
> One school of thought is that a good code should be written in such a
> way that the need for internal comments is drastically reduced (small
> methods with limited responsibility, a lot of attention to names, and a
> detailed explanation with uisage examples in the beginning of a class).

Yeah, I've read the reasoning behind that practice. I guess I'm just
old-school. The funny thing about the "good code should not _need_
comments" argument is that it just happens to justify what programmers have
always done, or actually not done, that is, not comment their code.

But, hey, now I'm sounding like a dour old pedant. Good Ruby code is a
pleasure to read, especially when I run across an idiom so clear and
powerful that it makes me want to start coding just so I can copy it.

And one of the things I learned at the feet of the masters is to not rely on
comments as a substitute for bad names and bad factoring.

> 
> I'd say, Ruby code of most popular programs is a great pleasure to read,
> even when comments are absent.
> RDoc for some of these things (even many in the standard library) is a
> different story though :)

100% agree.