On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 10:53 AM, Ryosuke Niwa <rn...@webkit.org> wrote: > On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 10:43 AM, Stephen Chenney <schen...@chromium.org> > wrote: >> >> As several people have shown, it is quite easy to come up with a formula >> that shows the cost of maintaining comments is much lower than the cost of >> living without. > > > I object to that conclusion. I've never seen any scientifically sound data > posted on this thread either for or against having comments. Furthermore, > just because we can come up with a formula doesn't mean that the formula > models the nature of the world well.
This is certainly true. I doubt you will see such a study, because it's very culturally-specific (in the sense that every group working on a shared code base is a culture). All code reading is training; you have to learn the styles and idioms of the codebase. As an aside, in WebKit, I think the culture is actually actually anti-comment enough that it's trained some people to not read comments at all, and so the value of comments is even lower. I have often had people ask questions about code in reviews that were answered by comments right above the lines in question :). -- Dirk _______________________________________________ webkit-dev mailing list webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org http://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo/webkit-dev