From: Mitch Vincent <mitch@...>
Date: 2001-04-22T04:38:04+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:13997] Re: From Guido, with love...

> >  You don't need comment when  the code is very well written.

    I don't think that could be further from the truth... Code that is well
written can still be extremely complex and hard for anyone to understand..
Besides, I define "well written code" as code that makes smart use of
whitespace, comments and hungarian notation.

> Whenever I'm trying to understand code written by someone else, typically
> the first thing I do is run it through 'sed' to get rid of the comments.

    If the comments are useless (and it's a little hard for anyone to know
that until *after*  they understand the code..) then you can ignore them or
change them to be useful.. If you got rid of the comments in any of my code
(for some of the larger projects), you'd run into trouble quick when you
made changes.. I always try to include "If you change this, you have to
change X,Y,Z over in the XYZ function etc etc" type comments... Most of the
things I include in my comments aren't the bleeding obvious, like a comment
"This checks to see if the variable iCount is above zero" right above the
if(iCount > 0) statement is useless and a total waste of space in my
opinion.. :-)

    *Good* comments are priceless, IMHO. *Good* comments can shave hours and
hours off code comprehension -- learned this from experience, though our
experiences are clearly different..

    Have a good one..

-Mitch