August 2008
Intermediate to advanced
464 pages
13h 48m
English

“Don’t comment bad code—rewrite it.”
—Brian W. Kernighan and P. J. Plaugher1
Nothing can be quite so helpful as a well-placed comment. Nothing can clutter up a module more than frivolous dogmatic comments. Nothing can be quite so damaging as an old crufty comment that propagates lies and misinformation.
Comments are not like Schindler’s List. They are not “pure good.” Indeed, comments are, at best, a necessary evil. If our programming languages were expressive enough, or if we had the talent to subtly wield those languages to express our intent, we would not need comments very much—perhaps not at all.
The proper use ...