begin quoting Christopher Smith as of Tue, Dec 12, 2006 at 04:24:19PM -0800: > Stewart Stremler wrote: > >And as for comments, well, great comments are hard, and good comments > >require effort; but writing a bunch of crappy comments and dropping in > >a bunch of templates merely improve the metric (comments::code) without > >adding value doesn't help. > > Yeah, Smalltalk folks in general tend to frown on comments. They see it > as a sign that a method is complex. Complexity is sometimes warranted > (in which case comments are insisted upon, rather than frowned upon), > but most often not. The preferred approach is to have short methods with > descriptive names (this is helped tremendously by the way Smalltalk > method names work when you have multiple parameters).
When I dig into something like Squeak, I start to think that Smalltalk easily falls over the other side of complexity -- with a bunch of tiny methods, trying to figure out what actually happens gets very difficult; and, in fact, many Smalltalkers don't even try... they use the debugger. The attitude seems to be "Why read when you can watch?" I just hate puzzling out what something does, and then trying to deduce what the programmer thought it SHOULD be doing instead. Some people get a kick out of puzzling out what a programmer intended, so having comments just takes all the fun out of it. -- _ |\_ \| -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
