Actually most of what you are putting them down for is actually good advice. I likewise use few comments, use descriptive variable names, comment each function, etc. If you are relying on understanding comments rather than figuring out the code, you will have serious problems when the two disagree. And they will come to disagree over time - a general principle is that whenever two things need to stay in sync (eg comments and code, code in two places, etc) they inevitably will tend to not do so perfectly.

The real problem sounds like the use of global variables and a cut-and-paste methodology...

For the record the single most miserable piece of code that I have had the misfortune to meet was also one of the most straightforward and heavily commented. It was utterly impenetrable for the same reason that legalese is so hard to read.

In reply to Re (tilly) 1: What you want and perl advocacy gone way wrong by tilly
in thread module info by ivory

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.