alt Hacker News> If good code was enough on its own we would read the source instead of documentation.
Uh. We do. We, in fact, do this very thing. Lots of comments in code is a code smell. Yes, really.
If I see lots of comments in code, I'm gonna go looking for the intern who just put up their first PR.
> I believe part of good software is good documentation
It is not. Docs tell you how to use the software. If you need to know what it does, you read the code.
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bottd • today at 12:06 PM
Not for everything. For code you own, yes this is often the case. For the majority of the layers you still rely on documentation. Take the project you mention going straight to source, did you follow this thread all the way down through each compiler involved in building the project? Of course not.
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> If you need to know what it does, you read the code.
True.
But If you need to know why it does what its does, you read the comments. And often you need that knowledge if you are about to modify it.