sje30 / sharing-report

INCF draft report for Cambridge 2014 meeting
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Comments / documention #20

Closed sje30 closed 9 years ago

sje30 commented 9 years ago

From Christophe:

Hi All,

Concerning the Documentation section lines 90 - 98 it could be worth 
quoting Paul Graham's opinion (ANSI Common Lisp, 1996, Prentice Hall, 
note 61 p 402):

"A lot has been said about benefits of comments, and little or nothing 
about their cost. But they do have a cost. Good code, like good prose, 
comes from constant rewriting. To evolve, code must be malleable and 
compact. Interlinear comments make programs stiff and diffuse, and so 
inhibit the evolution of what they describe."
jbpoline commented 9 years ago

That's an excellent quote - but is this not going a bit too far into the details ? It seems to me that there is a lot of ground between this and the general policy advocacy. Happy to include it though if you feel strongly about it, I do like the quote :)