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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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Comments make Perl unreadable, says Paul Graham 3 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • Strangely, I agree with Graham's point. Sparse, on-point comments are wonderful. Code that's too tricksy to grok should be rewritten. From my own experience, I find that my perl vocabulary has shrunk while making the programs easier for me to pick up months later. Also, debuggers work on code, not comments. That's to say, a reader needs to grok the code not what the comments say about the code. And the debugger is an excellent way to understand how the code really works. I recall exploring both Tk an

    • I don't find anything wrong with large comments outlining intention. What I (and I think Paul Graham) objects to is something like this:
      $a = $a + 1; # Add one to $a.

      -Dom

      • What I (and I think Paul Graham) objects to is something like this:

        $a = $a + 1; # Add one to $a.

        I also agree with Graham, and I don't think that was quite what he had in mind, especially since he mentioned Perl, and the above type of commenting can crop up in any language.

        One of the main reasons I love Perl is because of its expressiveness: the fact that the language is so malleable that you can craft the code to closely map to the underlying process that it's implementing. And that's what I alway

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