alt Hacker News> If there is a need to comment the code all over the place, to me it means that the code is maybe not as good as it should be :-)
If good code was enough on its own we would read the source instead of documentation. I believe part of good software is good documentation. The prose of literate source is aimed at documentation, not line-level comments about implementation.
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(originally developed at: https://docs.divio.com/documentation-system/) --- divides documentation along two axes:
- Action (Practical) vs. Cognition (Theoretical)
- Acquisition (Studying) vs. Application (Working)
which for my current project has resulted in:
- readme.md --- (Overview) Explanation (understanding-oriented)
- Templates (small source snippets) --- Tutorials (learning-oriented)
- Literate Source (pdf) --- How-to Guides (problem-oriented)
- Index (of the above pdf) --- Reference (information-oriented)
Having "grown up" on free software, I've always been quick to jump into code when documentation was dubious or lacking: there is only one canonical source of truth, and you need to be good at reading it.
Though I'd note two kinds of documentation: docs how software is built (seldom needed if you have good source code), and how it is operated. When it comes to the former, I jump into code even sooner as documentation rarely answers my questions.
Still, I do believe that literate programming is the best of both worlds, and I frequently lament the dead practice of doing "doctests" with Python (though I guess Jupyter notebooks are in a similar vein).
Usually, the automated tests are the best documentation you can have!
> If good code was enough on its own we would read the source instead of documentation.
An axiom I have long held regarding documenting code is:
Code answers what it does, how it does it, when it is used,
and who uses it. What it cannot answer is why it exists.
Comments accomplish this.> If good code was enough on its own we would read the source instead of documentation.
Uh. We do. We, in fact, do this very thing. Lots of comments in code is a code smell. Yes, really.
If I see lots of comments in code, I'm gonna go looking for the intern who just put up their first PR.
> I believe part of good software is good documentation
It is not. Docs tell you how to use the software. If you need to know what it does, you read the code.
> If good code was enough on its own we would read the source instead of documentation.
That's 100% how I work -- reading the source. If the code is confusing, the code needs to be fixed.