[MUD-Dev] DAoC dev team (was: MMORPG Comparison (UO, EQ, AC, AO, DAoC))

[John Buehler]

Brian Hook writes:
> Robin Lee Powell said:

>> Of course, my memory is absolutely pathetic, so that may have
>> something to do with it.  Also, I've had to take over large
>> pieces of undocumented code from others.  It's a nightmare.

> I don't believe in documentation, and barely even believe in
> comments.  The reason is pretty simple: you can spend as much time
> writing comments/docs as you do code, and inevitably they get out
> of sync.

> Code doesn't lie, comments do. And there is no worse feeling than
> "debugging" something only to find out that it was never broken --
> the comments were just out of date.

> I also believe that if you can't understand what code is doing the
> first time you glance at it, then there are better than even odds
> that the code is written poorly.

> Well written code should read like prose.  It's when it reads like
> code that you have problems.

Complete agreement.  Comments and documentation are the best way of
confusing engineers that I know of.  As a result, make sure your
code reads well.  Big variable names don't result in big
executables, ya know?  :) Code that is highly optimized for specific
reasons is another issue.  Comment that in the parts where you had
to go non-intuitive for performance reasons.

I always wanted to write a book entitled

	*pSoftComp

The subtitle was supposed to be

	The value of software comprehension.

JB

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