This is one of the things that really bugs me about a lot of open source and Github code: almost no comments.
It almost seems that there's a generation of programmers being taught that comments are a waste of time. I really don't know where this trend comes from. Lazy? I don't want to believe that.
For my purposes it is a huge negative mark if a programmer is not religious about commenting code. I will not hire someone like that. Why? Developing code is a huge financial investment, yes, but there are other metrics that are far more important than money. If you are doing something non-trivial it often requires a lot of thought, discussion, testing, experimentation, failures, iterations and decisions. Comments within code should be used to document some of this. Document intent, thinking, problem solving approach, corner cases, decisions, where/how it could be improved, performance notes, etc.
This and the code become incredibly valuable. It means that months or years later someone can go back into the code and truly understand what it does, why it does it that way, where it came from and, perhaps, how it could be improved. You don't need to engage in a research project in order to pick-up where the last programmers left of and continue moving forward. In addition to that I firmly believe a well-commented code-base is far more valuable during an acquisition than a thousand files of code with hardly a comment.
I can think of a number of Github projects I've come across with nearly zero comments. What you are looking at is dozens or hundreds of files vomited upon your hard drive that, yes, might perform a useful function at that point in time yet would be a nightmare to dive into to maintain them in any way. Before someone jumps down my throat: Just because something is FOSS it doesn't mean we should not critique such practices. If everyone took the time to thoughtfully document their code the FOSS ecosystem would probably evolve at a faster rate. Some of these packages are so dense they are virtually impenetrable without cubic hours of work deciphering the rats nest of files.
It almost seems that there's a generation of programmers being taught that comments are a waste of time. I really don't know where this trend comes from. Lazy? I don't want to believe that.
For my purposes it is a huge negative mark if a programmer is not religious about commenting code. I will not hire someone like that. Why? Developing code is a huge financial investment, yes, but there are other metrics that are far more important than money. If you are doing something non-trivial it often requires a lot of thought, discussion, testing, experimentation, failures, iterations and decisions. Comments within code should be used to document some of this. Document intent, thinking, problem solving approach, corner cases, decisions, where/how it could be improved, performance notes, etc.
This and the code become incredibly valuable. It means that months or years later someone can go back into the code and truly understand what it does, why it does it that way, where it came from and, perhaps, how it could be improved. You don't need to engage in a research project in order to pick-up where the last programmers left of and continue moving forward. In addition to that I firmly believe a well-commented code-base is far more valuable during an acquisition than a thousand files of code with hardly a comment.
I can think of a number of Github projects I've come across with nearly zero comments. What you are looking at is dozens or hundreds of files vomited upon your hard drive that, yes, might perform a useful function at that point in time yet would be a nightmare to dive into to maintain them in any way. Before someone jumps down my throat: Just because something is FOSS it doesn't mean we should not critique such practices. If everyone took the time to thoughtfully document their code the FOSS ecosystem would probably evolve at a faster rate. Some of these packages are so dense they are virtually impenetrable without cubic hours of work deciphering the rats nest of files.