Good ways to overcomplicate your code and slow down development

[Mark Wieder]

jbv-

Saturday, September 16, 2006, 2:30:21 AM, you wrote:

> why not take this seriously ?
> after all Xtalk can be viewed as the most advanced step of programing
> language that describes computer tasks in natural language, the ultimate
> step being fully natural language, which is what comments actually are...
> and therefore, a fully natural prog. language would make comments useless...

If you really insist on taking this seriously, I'd much rather have
things the other way around. My comments usually describe my
intentions much better than my attempts at coding same. I'd go for
something that compiled my comments unambiguously into executable code
any day. That would be the closest thing to a computer language that
knew what I was thinking.

Xtalk comes pretty close, but you still have to resort to pidgin to
get things done. I find

-- If the user entered text in the field then
-- see if they want to save it before exiting

much more readable than

if me is not empty then
  ask "Do you want to save this drivel?"
  if it is not "yes" then
    ...

...If you think comments in natural language are useless, try posting
a joke on a listserv without appending a smiley <g>...
    
-- 
-Mark Wieder
 mwieder at ahsoftware.net