I think it was Dijkstra that said that software actually lives in the mind of the programmer, and the code is just a distorted, lossy representation of that. An

I think it was Dijkstra that said that software actually lives in the mind of the programmer, and the code is just a distorted, lossy representation of that. Anything that gives us light on their thoughts is likely to improve our understanding of the software. Bugs happens when there's a mismatch between what's going on the mind of the programmer and what the code actually does, so when we read code a primary task is to understand what the programmer thought it should do. Comments informs us what are the stuff that the programmer cares enough to write down. When we see a seemingly trivial comment, we may ask: why did they took time to write down that? Did they think there was any subtlety we aren't aware of? Or perhaps they were inexperienced with the language, to the point of having a hard time reading the code they themselves wrote? (if I put this comment on Google, will I find they copy-pasted from Stack Overflow? -- in this case, the comment may be very helpful, if only to track down that [0]) [0] but even better would be an IDE that highlighted code copy-pasted from Stack Overflow, Github repositories, etc