Mostly we program in languages that read like a kind of shorthand english, and mature programmers are expected to be able to read the text fluently. WHAT commen

Mostly we program in languages that read like a kind of shorthand english, and mature programmers are expected to be able to read the text fluently. WHAT comments tend to be superfluous. Nobody sane reads 100+ character regexes fluently, so WHAT comments are totally appropriate. Any time I write a nontrivial regular expression, I always try leave an example of what it would match in a comment. I've thanked last-year me for this more times than I can count.