From: Barry Sperling <barry@...>
Date: 2005-04-28T04:36:03+09:00
Subject: Re: Comments Are More Important Than Code



Sy wrote:

> 
> Just who would be writing and maintaining all that "commenting"
> anyways?  The programmer is who.. so its style follows the
> programmer's mindset.. concise.. so they can move on to the next real
> issue --> more programming.
> 
> As soon as coders start leaning towards documentation.. the entire
> "programming" thing suffers.. unless there's some sort of freakish new
> vat-grown breed of programmer+documenter that I'm not aware of. 

Wow, and I was wondering where the phrase "code monkey" came from! 
Well, that's cleared up.

The coders ARE the ones who can document the choice of algorithms and 
explain why the function was written at all.  I've had to work on a lot 
of legacy, undocumented code and it is difficult. It wastes more of my 
time that it would have taken the writer to describe things well.  Is 
the original coder thinking of the maintainers?  No, not in this "me" 
generation.  Not in this "obfuscated code" generation ( hey, if you have 
trouble understanding this code I wrote then you must not be as smart as 
  I am! I win! )
	Barry