For this discussion, consider these ideas as well as your own reading and experiences. Then address one of the following questions in your post:
- “// Don’t change this line; it hurts!” Is this a useful code comment? Why or why not?
- If you worked with other software developers, would you appreciate comments in their code? How do you think they would benefit from comments in your code?
- If you managed a team of software developers, would you require them to use code comments? If so, to what degree would you have rules and procedures to follow, if any?
- In The Elements of Programming Style, a well-known computing study from the late 1970s, Kernighan and Plauger advocated a number of guidelines, called “lessons”, which they felt should guide software development, such as “Write clearly — don’t be too clever”, and “Avoid too many temporary variables”. One lesson was “Don’t document bad code — rewrite it”. Consider the meaning of this lesson in the context of code commenting. What does it mean to you?
- In recent years documentation generators have come along that can search for code comments, add them to an index, and annotate them with additional tips and cross-referencing. How might such a system be helpful or a hindrance?