While there are many resources to help programmers write better code—such as books and static analyzers—there are few for writing better comments. While it's easy to measure the quantity of comments in a program, it's hard to measure the quality, and the two are not necessarily correlated. A bad comment is worse than no comment at all. Here are some rules to help you achieve a happy medium.

Ellen Spertus

As a computer science professor, I encourage students to learn from mistakes, whether their own, mine, or famous examples. I feel it’s time to shine a light on my own mistakes to keep myself humble and in the hope that someone can learn from them.

Ellen Spertus