http://qs1969.pair.com?node_id=130458


in reply to Introduction to Technical Writing/Documentation

First let me add my thanks for a good tutorial on technical writing.

However I do have one small disagreement. The article that you link to by Drew Sikora offers what I consider to be horrible advice on commenting. He obviously gives short shrift to the real issues with how commenting style ages as code is maintained. He also fails to appreciate the importance and value of making code definitive. When you first write them your bug count in code and comments is approximately the same. But you catch errors in your code. You never see the ones in your comments. So if code and comment disagree (as they will from time to time) the code is rather more likely to be correct. And given that, what is the point of detailed comments that undermine the code? (In fact in some of his demonstration code he has exactly that issue. The comment suggests that += should be =. Yet he thinks that you should gloss over it? Huh?)

This is not to say that I don't think you should comment. You should. But you shouldn't comment in the ways that he recommends, or about the things that he says you should comment about. I could go on about this at length, but I won't bother doing so now because I already did. :-)

UPDATE
s/thrift/shrift/ (thanks to grinder for catching it)