Re: Opinions wanted on source style
Lew <l...@nospam.lewscanon.com> wrote:
It is absolutely unnecessary and arguably Evil to put off Javadocs until
later. There's a case to be made for doing them first. Procrastination in
this matter is like procrastination in writing exception-handling and
out-of-bounds domain checks, stupid, irresponsible acts of sabotage.
Tarkin wrote:
Were I working for anyone else but myself,
or if the code was any other release schedule
than 'Real Soon Now', I would agree with 'Evil'.
The first point /might/ let you get away with it, but the second is no excuse.
I am on the tightest schedules you can believe and still Javadoc everything
as I write it. It becomes the same as writing the code.
Whether you agree with the assessment or not does not change how Evil it is.
I've seen plenty of Javadoc that told me not
one iota of WTF the code _does_.
I've seen plenty of code that does not one iota of what it should. This is
not a reason not to write code, either.
I fully intend to *not* release any sort of Javadoc
that just includes the information I could
have gleaned from looking at a method
signature or class constructor.
Javadocs live independently of source. They organize information differently
from source. They cross-link the information. There is no comparison between
Javadocs and the source from which they were generated.
Javadocs are for when you don't have the source at hand or don't want to go to
it or need information packaged more usefully than in source comments.
They also comment the code nicely. Double duty, but different duties. They
aren't equivalent.
Does not excuse lack of comments or documentation.
At my skill level, I can't afford _not_
to do exception checking, so not coding
it in is not an option :^)
At any skill level this is true. From your statement here I would think you
are a master. That is the sort of thing a true master would say.
IDE's have been bandied about, but I am
working with constrained resources...my
test server is pIII ~800MHz pc running
Debian (but jdk 1.5.something (11?)),
w/ 256 MB of RAM. I don't dare run X
+ a window manager on it, since also
has Postgres and MySql. My other pc,
where I do have X + KDE + NetBeans
only has 512 MB. Needless to say,
NetBeans slows up when I have the 7
tabs I need opened up in Firefox.
So mostly I develop in vi on the server,
and use my other machine to watch log
files via ssh and see the fruits of
my labors in Firefox.
Get Ant.
--
Lew