This seems a bit related to some discussions I've been having lately. Bear with me. Really good programmers act as multipliers of other people's productivity.

This seems a bit related to some discussions I've been having lately. Bear with me. Really good programmers act as multipliers of other people's productivity. If you can build on code that I write and my code makes you more productive, then that makes my work worth a lot more. If you have to work hard to understand my code, I have failed. But in order for that to happen, not only does my code have to be good enough or do something useful: you have to be able to understand how to make correct use of it. Which means that I have to be able to communicate this to you. This means that it is my job to express myself in a way that maximizes the probability that you will understand how to correctly leverage my code. This is an incredibly hard thing to do. So no, I don't think it is good enough to demand that other people wisen up and develop a tolerance for terseness. This is a somewhat self-centered attitude where the programmer sees himself or herself as the most important. Which is great if you want to do solo projects -- but not useful if you are to allow other programmers to use your talent as an amplifier for their own work and ideas. (Of course, I agree with Steve that comments that read like an entire narrative are excessive. But most programmers fail to document intent and non-obvious quirks. And also, adding vertical whitespace is useful to delineate "paragraphs" of code so one doesn't have to actually read the code, but one can scan the code vertically)