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2010.07.11

Code Documentation

Technical prose is almost immortal.

— Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.

Although programming is a form of literary expression, the relationship between code and its documentation is uneasy at best. As Figure 1 shows, among the thousands of projects that FreeBSD maintainers have considered important enough to port to the platform, the number of comments per 100 lines varies substantially. Clearly, as developers our views on how we should document our code are anything but consistent. Yet, there are universal principles, nifty tools, and useful practices that can benefit us all.

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