Re: gEDA-user: Reinventing the wheel

[Stephan Boettcher <boettcher@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Kai-Martin Knaak <knaak@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> Russell Shaw wrote:
>
>> I think Scheme could be made much more attractive in geda if
>> it was adequately explained in documentation or a tutorial.
>  
> +1
> I wouldn't mind to learn (a new language). But to learn a new language by 
> almost non-commented code is just too much of a barrier. 

Learning a programming language by examples is hazardous.  Judging the
code by lack of comments without knowledge of the language is too.

Comments that help those who do not know the language to understand the
code belong in tutorials, but not production code.  Well written code
should be understandable, with full knowlegde of the semantics of the
language, but not necessarily without that knowledge.  

I do think that most code needs comments, but mostly exactly not the
comments that are present in the code.

I once learned TeX by reading the source of LaTeX2.09 (before reading
the TeXbook).  Nowadays I start with the language reference manual, skip
the tutorial, and _then_ jump into example code.

-- 
Stephan


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