From: harryo@... (Harry Ohlsen)
Date: 2001-04-24T18:10:08+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:14145] Re: From Guido, with love...

>>     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..
>
>Possibly this might be cause for concern...

I don't really want to enter into this debate ... partly because I
probably tend to overcomment :-) ... but I'll throw in one thing.

During my career, I've worked with a couple of excellent programmers
whose first language was not English.  Therefore, they had a harder
time coming up with illuminating English names for things like
variables and methods.

With their comments, I had no problem following the code, but without
them, I would have been lost.  The reason is that comments just give
you a little more context ... I'm obviously not talking about the
"test if x is greater than zero" style of comment.

I wonder if this is the same for our Japanese colleagues who read Ruby
code written by non-Japanese programmers?

Of course, the reason I find the comments useful may just be that I'm
thicker than most :-).