[wp-hackers] Re: 1.5.2 or on to 1.6?

[Martin Geisler]

Matthew Mullenweg <m at mullenweg.com> writes:

Hi Matt,

Thanks for your reply --- I hope you don't take it too personally that
I want to move your "furniture" and "books" around :-)

> I'm as aware as inconsistencies as anyone, like post.php not using
> the wp_insert_post function, but the highest priorities in
> development are focused at our two primary audiences, end-users (who
> never look at core code) and plugin authors (who use the documented
> APIs).

Okay, I can understand that.

> Commenting is tricky. Some "well-commented" code I've seen had a
> bunch of lines of repetitive filler that "documented" what you could
> easily see by just looking at the code itself and doubled the size
> of the program.

Yes, I've seen that kind of code too and that's just stupid.

> I also believe that well-written code usually doesn't need comments
> unless it's doing some sort of voodoo or workaround. (See
> gettext.php.)

Is this not a rather bad example?  I mean, that file comes from an
external project, who obviously know how to write proper doccomments.

And the idea that there can be such a thing as well-written code
containing no comments is bogus: it is only in small toy examples that
the function and argument names are enough to determine what a
function does.

Comments are *very* important in a weakly-typed language like PHP
where you cannot tell anything at all from looking at the function.

> I think if we surveyed our users, very few (if any) would bring up
> the "coding standard" as an issue they care about. We need to focus
> more on things like the excellent issues Mark J. raised in his
> response.

Sure, that's classical features --- but having a well-commented code
is also a feature, and for attracting developers and plugin authors I
believe that clean code is a very attractive feature.

-- 
Martin Geisler                                     GnuPG Key: 0x7E45DD38

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