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Beautiful article. Love the advice at the end!:

"What’s much more useful is recording what the deep insights are, and storing them for recollection later. Because every important mathematical idea has a deep insight, and these insights are your best friends. They’re your mathematical “nose,” and they’ll help guide you through the mansion."



I can't think of a better argument to goad programmers into writing code comments, especially for elegant code.

For some reason, programmers think good code should be self explanatory. It doesn't have to - if your insight is outside the flow (or the argument) of your code.

I see a lot of Java code written like this; if the programmer's job is to multiply two numbers, they add number a number b times, and say comments are not needed!




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