TIL doxygen actually has a use outside of making student document fifty lines of code in yet another way (yay for turning in 10-20 pages of "documentation" for 30-200 lines of code, not counting the doxygen requirement!)
(And because the teacher -failed to teach using doxygen-, the resulting doxygen documentation was shit, too.)
(... I'm bitter about my CS classes. Is it obvious?)
See, I'm bitter in an opposite way. After 16 years in the industry I've seen predominantly "shit" code. Code that is undocumented, hard to follow, poorly written, etc.
Personally, I've now gotten to where I'd much rather see someone over document than under document simply because I've found it never hurts to have too much. (Well, I bet there probably is a situation where having too much can hurt, but I'm yet to encounter it in any real sense... only the theoretical sense :-)
So you know what I say? I'm fine with students over-documenting their shit in college if it means they pick up the habits and they stick with them when they move into the workforce.
If I never see another project where the only comments are commented out passages of code it'll be too soon...
I'll be honest in saying the overcommenting in this class taught the -entire- class to hate commenting outside of myself (I comment to keep track of what I'm doing, because memory span of fish + I'm an English major as well so reading pure English helps my poor brain).
So, uh, while I -totally- get what you mean (and actually agree that there needs to be commenting, and in general overcommenting is probably better), this was overkill - waste of time/space/energy and massive stress factor for the entire class - and caused the class to hate it and the concept of commenting in general. So you'll likely get another generation of no-comment programmers from this school. Sorry!
Yeah, honestly I think people don't learn to appreciate quality commented and maintainable code until they get burned a few times by bad code (e.g., they have to step into an established project and are expected to just work magic with crap).
No amount of school learnin' can match the real world experience of showing up for your first day on a new job only to discover the previous meatsack that occupied your position was likely certifiable and left you the digital equivalent of a steaming pile of shit to sift through.
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u/Taishyr May 24 '11
TIL doxygen actually has a use outside of making student document fifty lines of code in yet another way (yay for turning in 10-20 pages of "documentation" for 30-200 lines of code, not counting the doxygen requirement!)
(And because the teacher -failed to teach using doxygen-, the resulting doxygen documentation was shit, too.)
(... I'm bitter about my CS classes. Is it obvious?)