I personally would care, because it doesn't matter you're using P2P for legal purposes. The RIAA seems more interested in the fact that it possible to use it for illegal ones. Even if it's hopeless, it's still nice to see someone stand up against that type of blanketing view.
For the most part, I find comments useless. They get in the way of quick typing (I hate hitting end and finding the curson beyond a comment, instead of still in the code where I can do something useful,) and they are only necessary if you can't understand the code.
Of course the obvious thought alot of people have is, "What do you do in six months when you come back to make a change?" To this I say that you should eitherremember still (this may be difficult if you spent most of your time commenting rather than coding,) or you should figure it out pretty quickly as you glance through the code (if you can't, then how did you manage to write it in the first place?)
Don't get me wrong. I think that comments CAN be useful. I just think that people tend to rely on them too much. I use comments as placeholders for sections of code I'll write later, and for tricky stuff sometimes, such as extensive bit manipulations, but I don't think there's much reason to use them elsewhere. Proper name choices will tell you enough to get going quickly, and if you're trying to alter things on a more detailed level, you'd better understand the code anyway.
There's also an additional problem with comments in certain languages. In Scheme, for instance, when you can easily end up with very small, but powerful functions that have mutual recursion with multiple other functions, comments wouldn't really make sense. You would need to understand the functions already just to follow the order of execution in order to tell which comments you should even be looking at.
Slashdot Mirror
I personally would care, because it doesn't matter you're using P2P for legal purposes. The RIAA seems more interested in the fact that it possible to use it for illegal ones. Even if it's hopeless, it's still nice to see someone stand up against that type of blanketing view.
For the most part, I find comments useless. They get in the way of quick typing (I hate hitting end and finding the curson beyond a comment, instead of still in the code where I can do something useful,) and they are only necessary if you can't understand the code.
Of course the obvious thought alot of people have is, "What do you do in six months when you come back to make a change?" To this I say that you should eitherremember still (this may be difficult if you spent most of your time commenting rather than coding,) or you should figure it out pretty quickly as you glance through the code (if you can't, then how did you manage to write it in the first place?)
Don't get me wrong. I think that comments CAN be useful. I just think that people tend to rely on them too much. I use comments as placeholders for sections of code I'll write later, and for tricky stuff sometimes, such as extensive bit manipulations, but I don't think there's much reason to use them elsewhere. Proper name choices will tell you enough to get going quickly, and if you're trying to alter things on a more detailed level, you'd better understand the code anyway.
There's also an additional problem with comments in certain languages. In Scheme, for instance, when you can easily end up with very small, but powerful functions that have mutual recursion with multiple other functions, comments wouldn't really make sense. You would need to understand the functions already just to follow the order of execution in order to tell which comments you should even be looking at.