Re: Encouraging good comments Which language ?

[Axel Kittenberger <axkibe@...>]

> (2) Who benefit from them?
> (3) Who pay the cost of writing and maintaining them?

The magic line is: Little cost, great benefit. Come'on are you telling
me, writing a single line of english per function is going to take you
that much longer for a project? How long does it take you to write an
average sized function, including debugging all bugs etc. vs. the time
it takes to write a single line of english. Also compare how long does
it take for someone to understand the function with and without the
line.


> Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia
> http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm
> Replace "metadata" with "code comment" and see how it works out for you :D

Sorry, but this analogy is very faulty:
#1 People lie  -- So you are fearing of coders lieing in the comments?
You got serious problems elsewhere.
#2 People are lazy -- Yes, so what? At least say, I'm too lazy to help
you understand the code. Be at least honest about it, instead of
coming up this usual "good code explains itself" excuse crap.
#3 People are stupid --- If your coder is stupid, you got serious
problems elsewhere.
#4 Mission: Impossible -- know thyself --- There is no weighting in
comments. So several coders have a different style in commenting so
what?
#5 Schemas aren't neutral -- Who required comments to be "neutral".
Dude. What seriously, this is one of the badest analogies made.
#6 Metrics influence results -- For comments? Please, yes they *do*
make a difference.
#7 There is more than one way to describe something --- Who cares?
Nobody said one function would only have one possible english language
to describe its function.

Sorry, please overthing your analogy. Nothing of it applies.
"Metacrap" is about the problems of hugh distributed databases, with
an undefined and uncontrolled number of people contributing some of
the malicious. This does not apply in any way to any sane coding
project.