Docstrings considered too complicated

[Ben Finney]

Gregory Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> writes:

> However, that's only a very small part of what goes to make good code.
> Much more important are questions like: Are the comments meaningful
> and helpful? Is the code reasonably self-explanatory outside of the
> comments? Is it well modularised, and common functionality factored
> out where appropriate? Are couplings between different parts
> minimised? Does it make good use of library code instead of
> re-inventing things? Is it free of obvious security flaws?
>
> You can't *measure* these things. You can't objectively boil them down
> to a number and say things like "This code is 78.3% good; the customer
> requires it to be at least 75% good, so it meets the requirements in
> that area."

That doesn't reduce the value of automating and testing those measures
we *can* make.

> That's the way in which I believe that software engineering is
> fundamentally different from hardware engineering.

Not at all. There are many quality issues in hardware engineering that
defy simple measurement; that does not reduce the value of standardising
quality minima for those measures that *can* be achieved simply.

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Ben Finney