On 11 August 2015 at 13:34, <phiscock@ee.ryerson.ca> wrote:
I admit this is mostly because I keep extensive notes in the source code and am perhaps a bit embarrassed what those notes say both about my memory and my limited coding skills. I should probably just get over it - particularly since the code itself probably says more than the notes.
My experience with open source is that it is undercommented, if indeed it has any comments at all. (Darktable, I'm looking at you.) It's enormously helpful to understand the writer's thinking process. People can skip over the comments or even do a selective erase if they don't like them.
Then, if the reader understands your objective and finds your code clunky in achieving that objective, they can show their superior grasp by providing an alternative (often more concise and difficult to understand) solution.
I'm reminded of stories of Gauss, the famous mathematician and scientist of whom it was said 'he removed all the scaffolding from his constructions, so it appeared he arrived at the result by magic'. There's too much of that kind of thinking in software.
Thanks to everyone for the thoughts, it was a help. And here we have it for anyone who's interested: https://github.com/gilesorr/gitcheck -- Giles http://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr@gmail.com