alt Hacker News> 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.
> 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.
Do you have an example of such knowledge that you need to get from the comments? I have been programming for 20 years, and I genuinely don't see that much code that is so complex that it needs comments.
Not that it doesn't exist; sometimes it's needed. But so rarely that I call it "comments", and not a whole discipline in itself that is apparently be called "literate programming". Literate programming sounds like "you need to comment pretty much everything because code is generally hard to understand". I disagree with that. Most code is trivial, though you may need to learn about the domain.