Your formatting point is close to my heart. Personally amongst other things I have a vendetta against the use of tabs - I replace them all with 4 spaces in any file I touch! I go "s:///g" and its kaput to them all!!. Actually I'd throw out Hungarian notation as well - you just can't be relying on the name of variable to know its type!
With regards code comments and documentation, well unless someone can come up with a good Literate Programming environment that could be adopted by mainstream developers, this will always be an uphill battle. Time is money and I'd recommend spending more of it writing better structured code then documents that can rarely be updated as quickly as the code in your typical process driven environment.
-
The fellow who designed it
is working far away;
The spec's not been updated
For many a livelong day.
The guy who implemented it is
Promoted up the line;
And some of the enhancements
Didn't match to the design
They haven't kept the flowcharts,
The manual's a mess,
And most of what you need to know,
You'll simply have to guess.
David Diamond. "For a Friend Assigned to a Maintenance Group" in Datamation, June 1976, pg 134
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Your formatting point is close to my heart. Personally amongst other things I have a vendetta against the use of tabs - I replace them all with 4 spaces in any file I touch! I go "s:// /g" and its kaput to them all!!. Actually I'd throw out Hungarian notation as well - you just can't be relying on the name of variable to know its type!
With regards code comments and documentation, well unless someone can come up with a good Literate Programming environment that could be adopted by mainstream developers, this will always be an uphill battle. Time is money and I'd recommend spending more of it writing better structured code then documents that can rarely be updated as quickly as the code in your typical process driven environment.
-
The fellow who designed it
is working far away;
The spec's not been updated
For many a livelong day.
The guy who implemented it is
Promoted up the line;
And some of the enhancements
Didn't match to the design
They haven't kept the flowcharts,
The manual's a mess,
And most of what you need to know,
You'll simply have to guess.
David Diamond. "For a Friend Assigned to a Maintenance Group" in Datamation, June 1976, pg 134