"Self-documenting code" is already a thing called Code-as-Docs. It's the inverse of Docs-as-Code, where you're "writing documentation like you write code". Code

"Self-documenting code" is already a thing called Code-as-Docs. It's the inverse of Docs-as-Code, where you're "writing documentation like you write code". Code-as-Docs is where you write Code that is self-documenting. (And this has absolutely nothing to do with Literate Programming.) You do not have to adhere to any specific principles or methods or anything specific in order to do Code-as-Docs. Just write your code in a way that explains what it is doing, so that you don't need comments to understand it. This often means refactoring your code to make it clearer what it does. It may not be what your ideal engineer brain wants the code to do, but it will make much more sense to anyone maintaining it. Plus very simple things like "variables-that-actually-describe-what-they-do" (in a loop over node names, don't make a variable called x; make a variable called node_name) edit It seems like I'm the only one who says "Code-as-docs"... by searching for "Code-as-documentation" instead of "Code-as-docs", I found this: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/CodeAsDocumentation.html https://martinfowler.com/bliki/CodeAsDocumentation.html I guess "self-documenting code" more hits: https://www.google.com/search?q=self-documenting+code https://www.google.com/search?q=self-documenting+code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-documenting_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-documenting_code https://wiki.c2.com/?SelfDocumentingCode https://wiki.c2.com/?SelfDocumentingCode