I find it interesting to come across another discussion about writing good code with no real examples of where code has been improved through the use of the pra

I find it interesting to come across another discussion about writing good code with no real examples of where code has been improved through the use of the practices being advocated. How am I supposed to know if the comments have really helped the code, or if is that the code was just not written in a self-documenting way to begin with? Or, form the other perspective, how am I to know if the self-documenting code isn't as self-documenting as the original author likes to think? Perhaps even more importantly, how will I learn to take on that better style without examples to study? In a world where we have a treasure-trove of great open source software, you would think the first step would be to point to exemplar examples to show exactly what can be gained by writing code in the prescribed manner. The "I do it this way and it is great. Believe me.", unfortunately, does not make for a good discussion.