[Seaside] Re: Why seaside really sucks! COMMMMMMMENTS are MISSING

[Andreas Raab]

Jason Johnson wrote:
> Yes, a short to the point comment like that in something that takes some 
> thought like recursion is a good idea.  I'm just talking about when 
> someone writes huge books for every method, complete with fancy ASCII 
> art headers and such (for every method!).  Of course, that kind of brain 
> dead practice is much more common in other languages, but I figured I 
> would throw it out there since no one else did. :)

Well, I'll gladly have *that* problem :-) And I'll happily trade a few 
hundred overly lengthy comments against the 250+ uncommented classes and 
2500+ uncommented methods in Seaside ;-)

> Well, it's not my opinion that if you can't understand my code you're an 
> idiot.  It is more my opinion that if you can't read my code then I need 
> to write clearer code (that is, it's an insult to me not you).  Some 
> comments save time, but we have other things that save time as well 
> (e.g. method categories).

True. I still think there is a difference when people write a comment 
though, because it implies that they realize others will look at this 
code (and the knowledge that other people will look at your work has 
been shown to have an effect on how humans act; it wouldn't surprise me 
if there were actually a correlation between comments and quality of code).

> Again, I was talking about the cost of having to *read through the 
> comments*. I wasn't thinking about time spent writing the comments at 
> all. 

Oh, wow. Have you truly ever been in a situation where you've really 
felt that reading the comments wasn't worth it? Not on a small scale 
(I'm sure there are a few methods for which the comments are inadequate) 
but on a scale of a framework like Seaside. A situation where you'd 
rather been without any comments to begin with? I find it hard to even 
imagine what code must look like which has been "commented to death" (if 
you have an example I'd really love to check it out). Usually, that's 
not exactly the kind of problem I face ;-)

Cheers,
   - Andreas