Comments have to maintained, too. And quite often, they aren't. The result is a program that lies to the reader. The greater the proportion of comment lines, the greater the risk that someone downstream will break the comments while extending the code. Broken comments adds to downstream risk. Broken comments also add to the risk that the reader won't trust any of the comments, which further burdens maintenance efforts.

This is one of the forces that needs to be balanced in order to find the right mix of comments to code.

The eXtreme Programming folks take an extreme view on comments. They hold that comments are one of theCode Smells that are clues that your code has problems. If you need to write lots of comments, it's an indication that your code isn't clear enough, and that you should put effort into cleaning up the code so that it describes itself.

(This is a point on which reasonable people can differ.)

In reply to Re: Too much documentation? by dws
in thread Too much documentation? by melguin

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.