Commenting out code is always a good policy. I think that what Carlos said applies only to small applications.

Huge blocks of code which otherwise can not be splited up definitely need a comment introduction. Actually, it makes no sense at all not including comments: there’s no penalty on the application whatsoever since they’re ignored by the compiler (although they may influence an interpreter because it will have to ignore the lines in runtime).

Pray for the comments! :-)

You see a lot of this bandied around and it is wrong. I’ll tell you why.

I am a PeopleSoft developer, yes real enterprise stuff but I’m not putting it over anyone, PeopleTool/Code has a lot of catching up to do with most languages, I mostly hate it. I’ll get to that.

The thing is with Enterprise code there is a lot of business logic, well it’s all business logic really, 100%. When the programmer writes the logic as code they can make a mistake, there is a LOT of complex, interacting, dynamic, sometimes poorly analysed (correct spelling in the queen’s English) business logic.

Sure we can understand the code the programmer has written but what was the logic SUPPOSED to be, in plain English/German whatever? What were you trying to do when you stuffed up (which is why I am now fixing your code), and for god sakes don’t make it so I have to spend 30 minutes digesting this massive SQL statement, complete with views that have their own massive SQL statements, just tell it to me in a simple comment man! Be reasonable, your poorly thought out, illogical, inconcise code is hard to follow especially when you use hundreds of unneccessary variables that all look the same: $AP_EP_RO & &AP_IP_RO & &AP_IP_RA.

So there you have my reasons for absolutely hating code with no comments. It is quicker to modify, debug and extend (usually poorly written, it’s the real world) code if it contains comments. They aren’t too hard to write are they?

So yeah PeopleCode/Tools (www.oracle.com) Put it this way, they have just introduced colour syntax highlighting. Need I say more? … But the framework, oh the framework, where you will use 50 lines of code in Rails, PCode will use 0, and have industrial strength security, cross-browser support, scalability, web services, WYSIWYG design tool… the list goes on.

But yeah, please comment your code so we know what you were trying to do/doing without having to lookup general designs, make phone calls to functional experts or digest hundreds of lines of rubbish/code.

I find this a bit hard to believe… Are you sure you are using the server VM on Linux? I’m not sure, but I think it’s the default on Solaris, but everywhere else it’s only picked up by default if the box has more than 2Gb of RAM _and_ two or more CPUs.

I’m a TextMate fan too but sometimes need a similar (read: as good as) product for Linux because some times my girlfried steals my mac (shh designers…) and the time it takes me to (re-)learn how to make good use of Gedit is not acceptable.

However i’ve recently started using Komodo Edit (for mac and linux) and it seems to be a preety good tool. Have you tried it yet?

Believe me, it is. As a language, I strongly prefer Java, and tried to the limit using it as the foundation for the sites I develop. However, one must concede that PHP sweeps Java into a corner. At least on Linux, Java has two serious flaws:
1) The JVM is just not performant enough. It does not compare to the speed it shows on Solaris.
2) It has piss poor memory management. Up to the ridiculous point of never releasing memory to the OS. This means that a particular VM is constantly using the peak value of memory. Combine with the excellent Linux disk cache (whose performance the JVM hampers) and Java is tossing away a performance boost that PHP gladly uses to race away. On setups where the VM coexists with a database, the memory hogging behavior worsens the scenario even more.

Nope. Please enlighten us. :)

Python code should be as readable as Ruby* code. If it isn’t, the problem is the programmer, not the language. If you need to comment code to make it understandable, the code is bad, rewrite it.

Now, I’ve seen plenty of examples of people trying to be clever in Python, I’ll give you that. The language is flexible enough to allow for all sorts of weird idioms that nobody else understands. And the world is full of micro-optimizer types that think “cleverising” code to gain a couple of miliseconds is a good idea. Eh, if they wanted highly optimized code, they should never gotten into Python in the first place…

And the fun part is very well know Python books actually encourage the use of clever tricks. For instance, “Dive into Python” has a whole section dedicated to the “and or” trick, which is ugly, has a bunch of problems and isn’t actually _needed_ in the real world…

I’ve tried several editors and stuck with this one! Quite good, but still not final… Has project-code-completion (not ruby yet, but will have).

Try it!

I was trying to put the reference right here but Wordpress is removing the < / a > tag and screwing this up. I’ll show it to you in a minute.