Comments on: Top Ten Habits of Successful Programmers http://codepad.classhelper.org/top-ten-habits-of-successful-programmers/223/ Technology, education, and current events. Wed, 24 Jun 2009 20:42:05 -0400 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 By: Jane Q. Public http://codepad.classhelper.org/top-ten-habits-of-successful-programmers/223/comment-page-1/#comment-30 Jane Q. Public Tue, 24 Mar 2009 01:02:34 +0000 http://codepad.classhelper.org/?p=223#comment-30 (5) Source control is essential but few use CVS anymore. Most have moved on to SVN, and by now even Git. (7) Many Agile shops working with newer languages like Ruby now consider that code should be effectively self-commenting. When working with a well-structured framework like Rails, this may be true, but I do not agree 100% with that philosophy... I think there will always be times when comments are called for. Even the newer languages, while often easier to read, can contain obscure references and terse, nearly-indecipherable clauses. However, given the relative clarity of modern languages, I do subscribe to the principle that comments should be more concerned with WHY something is being done, rather than simply describing what a chunk of code is doing. (5) Source control is essential but few use CVS anymore. Most have moved on to SVN, and by now even Git.

(7) Many Agile shops working with newer languages like Ruby now consider that code should be effectively self-commenting. When working with a well-structured framework like Rails, this may be true, but I do not agree 100% with that philosophy… I think there will always be times when comments are called for. Even the newer languages, while often easier to read, can contain obscure references and terse, nearly-indecipherable clauses.

However, given the relative clarity of modern languages, I do subscribe to the principle that comments should be more concerned with WHY something is being done, rather than simply describing what a chunk of code is doing.

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