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How Experienced And Novice Programmers See Code
Esther Schindler writes "We always talk about how programmers improve their skill by reading others' code. But the newbies aren't going to be as good at even doing that, when they start. There's some cool research underway, using eye tracking to compare how an experienced programmer looks at code compared to a novice. Seems to be early days, but worth a nod and a smile."
Reader Necroman points out that if the above link is unreachable, try this one. The videos are also available on YouTube: Expert, Novice.
Comments that describe what the code is doing are useless. Comments that describe why the code does what it does are invaluable.
If I'm reviewing untrusted third-party code, or code which is suspected to be buggy, I agree, but it really slows things down, even at an expert level, to completely ignore comments, if it's a setting where I'm working with people I know to be good engineers, and am not actively debugging/auditing their code. There has to be some amount of trust to make large projects work, and trusting that my colleagues are writing sane and reasonably accurate comments is one form of it. If it turns out to be wrong in a certain case, well, that's what tests are there to discover.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
An inexperienced coder sees code they have written, and everything else is unintelligible crap that only a moron would have written.
An experienced coder just sees everything as unintelligible crap that only a moron would write.