Most gratuitous comments

[sjmsoft at gmail.com]

Many years ago I, too, had a couple of CS profs who forced us to include too many (usually innocuous) comments in our Fortran and PL/1 code.  Perhaps they were trying to counter the natural programmer tendency of not commenting at all?

Forty years of programming later (yikes!), I try to use comments to tell WHY I'm doing what I'm doing, especially when it's not obvious to someone else (or to me in about two weeks).  I never use comments to teach the reader what the Python language or libraries do.

Cheers,
  Steve J. Martin