On 11 August 2015 at 13:34, <[email protected]> wrote: >> I admit this is mostly because >> I keep extensive notes in the source code and am perhaps a bit >> embarrassed what those notes say both about my memory and my limited >> coding skills. I should probably just get over it - particularly >> since the code itself probably says more than the notes. >> > My experience with open source is that it is undercommented, if indeed it > has any comments at all. (Darktable, I'm looking at you.) It's enormously > helpful to understand the writer's thinking process. People can skip over > the comments or even do a selective erase if they don't like them. > > Then, if the reader understands your objective and finds your code clunky > in achieving that objective, they can show their superior grasp by > providing an alternative (often more concise and difficult to understand) > solution. > > I'm reminded of stories of Gauss, the famous mathematician and scientist > of whom it was said 'he removed all the scaffolding from his > constructions, so it appeared he arrived at the result by magic'. There's > too much of that kind of thinking in software.
Thanks to everyone for the thoughts, it was a help. And here we have it for anyone who's interested: https://github.com/gilesorr/gitcheck -- Giles http://www.gilesorr.com/ [email protected] --- Talk Mailing List [email protected] http://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
