Re: LYNX-DEV Looking ahead. WAS [ One post, many things. ]

[David Combs]

We once had this guy working for us, and he was finally leaving,
after several years of writing a lot of complex and undocumented
code.

For the final two months I sat down at the console, with him at my
side, and we went over the code, line by line.

Every variable that didn't say what it meant, I changed it.

His method had been to code complex pieces of code in separate
statements, so he could step through it with the debugger.  Once
he got it working, then he changed it into one long expression
full of ands and ors and if-exprs, etc -- looked nicer to him --
but of course that wasn't steppable in the debugger any more.

So, I undid all those (after he went home each day during this final
period).

I had to understand each statement in his work, and if I didn't, he
had to explain it to me so that I did understand it -- then I would
add comments with that explanation.   Or I ref'ed another file
and explained it in that.

----

Now, Fote HAS to be getting tired of all the hassle from this list,
from probably having zero time for himself, family, etc.  If only
he had the time and energy to really document everything.  Only doing
that might take as long as writing the program itself from scratch!

One problem with doing documentation without the eventual years-later
reader sitting at one's side is knowing just WHAT needs documenting.

What is "obvious" or "self evident -- just read the code nearby" to
the original programmer is usually NOT obvious at all to that
later reader.  My own problem is that I just cannot hold all that
much stuff in my head -- I need to be reminded again and again
of what a variable does, what some other code did, etc.

Also, I imagine that the person who INVENTED the code, modified it,
rethought it, etc, has it buried far deeper in the brain, almost
permanently, than anyone later who wants to work only part time
on it.  

---

Too bad computers don't yet take dictation, like "well, first I tried
doing this via method A, but because of ..., that didn't work, so I
finally did this piece here via method X -- which of course made me
change the code over in foo() ..."

Hope this helps (I am sure it doesn't!)
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