From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 109fba,f292779560fb8442 X-Google-Attributes: gid109fba,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,30e368bdb3310fe5 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Thread: fac41,af40e09e753872c X-Google-Attributes: gidfac41,public X-Google-Thread: 10db24,30e368bdb3310fe5 X-Google-Attributes: gid10db24,public X-Google-Thread: 1008e3,30e368bdb3310fe5 X-Google-Attributes: gid1008e3,public X-Google-Thread: f8c65,30e368bdb3310fe5 X-Google-Attributes: gidf8c65,public X-Google-Thread: 1014db,30e368bdb3310fe5 X-Google-Attributes: gid1014db,public From: Darius Blasbans Subject: Re: The Last Word on Comments (was Re: Hungarian notation) Date: 1996/06/11 Message-ID: <31BDA4C0.40D5@phidani.be>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 159647854 references: <4o07o9$rfu@seagoon.newcastle.edu.au> <4o1vo3$p2a@news1.ni.net> <4oegks$ntn@goanna.cs.rmit.EDU.AU> to: "Clark L. Coleman" content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii organization: PHIDANI Software, Bruxelles, Belgium mime-version: 1.0 newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.modula3,comp.lang.modula2,comp.edu,comp.lang.eiffel x-mailer: Mozilla 2.01Gold (Win95; I) Date: 1996-06-11T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Clark L. Coleman wrote: > > I have 15 years industrial software engineering experience on a variety > of projects in a variety of software engineering environments at 4 > companies. The people who claim to be from industry and have posted > on this subject have been really disappointing. I shudder to think that > someone is paying them to develop code if they really think you add > comments after the code is written. You made a point here. Comments must be part of the code production process. > Among the amazingly bogus statements made in this discussion was the > declaration that any comment indicates that your language was not > expressive enough, and hence you would ideally have no comments. This > is surely the most ignorant statement ever made about the subject. Please excuse me for not feeling concerned about the 'ignorant' adjective, but I kind of disagree with you here. We try to promote an approach where comments should be formal as far as possible, hence, executable. Assertions (pre and post-conditions, etc...) are often understood as a quality insurance feature, while we consider it as a way for the code to express the implicit knowledge he (or she) has about how things are supposed to happen in a formal, standardized, and executable way. On the other hand, if one uses a Tree of components, using a language with well-designed genericity, is there anything to comment, really, about having an object: Data: Tree(Records); I truly believe that higher level languages do contribute to fewer comments. It is true that if you have a unification algorithm coded in C++, it must be commented. It is also true that if you use unification in a language where it is a built-in primitive (consider Prolog, for instance), how much is there to comment ? Unless you are of the "i++; /* increment i */" kind of guy. > If you have not worked on truly large projects that were proven to > be maintainable by others after you were finished; if you have not > worked on dozens of software engineers / hundreds of thousands of > lines of code projects; if you don't understand what "stepwise refinement" > really means; if you think programming consists of sketching out an > algorithm on a sheet of paper and then coding; PLEASE do not waste > net bandwidth replying to this message. Get an education and some real > experience first. I guess it would be childish to compare our experience, trying to convince each other that "I know the real thing". Lots of big projects are developed in a pretty foolish way. Huge projects are written with huge amounts of documentation and comments, and still fail to deliver. Regards, Darius