Xarg blog Archive

I found the article about the Win2K source at Kuro5hin.org pretty entertaining. The funny thing is the whole issue of innappropriate comments in code has come up a number of times with ACS and later OpenACS. It even inspired Philip to write an article about it and it came up more than once from clients who looked at the source. I am not at all surprised to find that comments like this exist in Microsoft's code since they are not at all visible to the end user, well not usually anyway :)

There are still a lot of "Hack" type comments in OpenACS but since the code is visible and people have complained, we have thought of the children and removed the "f word". I really like the pithy comments though, it does a far better job of conveying the history of the code and the personalities of the people who have worked on it that a grey uniform "professional" expunging of anything even remotely offensive ever could.

Code needs to work and be correct but the comments should convey the intent and the nuance of complicated ideas. And with large messy systems sometimes nuance is just not enough...