I believe this thought reveals the truth of Fred Brooks's famous aphorism that there is "no silver bullet" when it comes to managing complexity in software. There is no shortcut to comprehension. Comments can only help a certain amount, whether they be written by/for the original programmer, or someone following them. Often they actually cloud things, or are a distraction, and often do not keep up with the code as it itself is changed.

The proof of this is in coming back to a piece of code written by yourself or another, and trying to understand why it behaves in a particular (wrong) way when it shouldn't. By definition, comments (and indeed code) are written with the amount of understanding available to the programmer(s) at the time they wrote it, which is by definition finite. There is no shortcut to simply putting in the effort to understand what it is actually doing.

In reply to Re^2: The path to mastery by etj
in thread The path to mastery by tilly

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.