On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 10:58 AM, Richard Parker <r.richardpar...@comcast.net> wrote: > It's time to stop having flame wars about languages and embrace programmers > who care enough about possible future readers of their code to thoroughly > comment it. Comments are far more valuable than the actual language in which > the code is written, IMHO.
The problem with comments (and documentation in general) is that they are often imperfect. If the code is absolutely opaque but it has a comment next to it, you still have that niggling doubt: has the comment been updated whenever the code has? Was it even accurate in the first place? (Comments often say what a piece of code _ought_ to do, but the code might have a bug in it. And sometimes, that bug ends up being part of the function's definition, and people depend on it.) I'd rather have both - reasonably readable code AND a comment, where the comment explains the intent behind the code. // allow space for frobnostication height += BTN_HEIGHT; Chris Angelico -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
