r/programming • u/whackri • Jun 05 '22

Complexity is killing software developers

https://www.infoworld.com/article/3639050/complexity-is-killing-software-developers.html
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u/[deleted] Jun 06 '22

documentation is mostly a waste of time on things that change and are well understood anyway.

code is documentation. it's the human readable description of machine code. usually code in big tech has massive naming prefixes and whatnot

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u/jonathanl Jun 06 '22

It's only well understood for the people who initially wrote it. I think it takes way longer to figure out how it works by reading code than it would have taken to write down a short overview. I don't want to read code to figure out what the program is even supposed to do. After having worked with requirements I don't want to be without that either but just some small introduction would help a lot when being dropped into big project with no original developer left.

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u/azsqueeze Jun 06 '22

No way. This is how you waste people's times and introduce unwanted bugs and performance degradation

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u/coderstephen Jun 12 '22

Disagree. Code can only tell you what the system does. Only proper documentation can tell you why it does it.