> the whole "code should be self-explanatory" ethos seems to me just as susceptible to encouraging bad behavior. I hope it's clear from what I wrote that I don

> the whole "code should be self-explanatory" ethos seems to me just as susceptible to encouraging bad behavior. I hope it's clear from what I wrote that I don't think code can be perfectly self-explanatory. I don't think it's all-or-nothing in either direction. I do, however, think that direct clarity is the first line of defense, followed by comments and other documentation artifacts to capture what the code cannot. > Expecting people to judge their own communication is a definite conflict of interest. I don't disagree: while I think it's possible to train your communications so that you meet a minimum bar by default, that training necessarily comes by testing your communication against others. We have peer review processes in part to help account for this: if something isn't clear, that's the first forum of opportunity to address it. The (only) good thing about pithy quotes like "you should be able to rewrite it from the comments" and "code should be self-explanatory" is that they stake out concrete, extreme positions that can be judged on their merits. The space of practice is much wider than the ideologically pure boundary. I'm sure that, for your situation, commenting everything such that it could be rewritten from scratch makes sense. If you needed to pass ownership of a codebase more or less instantaneously, it may make sense as a kind of snapshot of the intent behind the codebase at that point in time. I also work with some critical, ancient software. I wish I had more documentation of all kinds, but mostly because it would help me decipher the codebase itself. I wish the codebase didn't need the degree of deciphering that it does. It makes even minor changes take longer just to make sure I'm not breaking something else along the way -- to say nothing of major changes, which while relatively rare do come along. Again: my biggest need is to decipher the codebase itself, and I would rather it inherently require less effort to do so. There are straightforward principles, like "avoid globals", that are violated left and right in this software by no real necessity. Commenting these aspects is a simply a band-aid on something that should have been engineered better from the beginning.