Comments

[vk4ffab]

Well, some people like to be helpful and others don't give a toss.

'Owe'? Nothing, nada, zero, zilch. But an enlightening question.

And there are a lot of people on the internet who think they are owed the corporate client experience and 24/7 support for stuff posted on github. Demand it even. And while you try and make this about me being a mean old man who is not helpful, not a team player and does not give a toss, my position is a rather simple one, if you wanna use my stuff, you are going to have to put some effort in here and at least understand the fundamentals of what is going on if you want to change it in anyway. That is pretty much the condition of entry into all open source.

[PlainName]

And while you try and make this about me being a mean old man who is not helpful, not a team player and does not give a toss

Yes, that's unwarranted and I apologise.

[vk4ffab]

And while you try and make this about me being a mean old man who is not helpful, not a team player and does not give a toss

Yes, that's unwarranted and I apologise.

All good.

[helius]

For most part programming is nothing more than translating from an imprecise concept expressed in human terms to a precise language understood by a machine.

"Our design ... reflects two major concerns. First, we want to establish the idea that a computer language is not just a way of getting a computer to perform operations but rather that it is a novel formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology. Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." -- Abelson and Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, from the Preface to the First Edition

The logical extension of this idea was brought out by Donald Knuth in the 1980s. If programs are primarily texts written for other humans, and only secondarily for computers to run, the relationship of code and comments should be inverted: the dominant or overarching element should be expository writing (the "comments"), with executable code snippets included in it passim.

Knuth published a book on this idea, describing a software package (CWEB) that compiles these Literate Programs into files a compiler can use. https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/lp.html

[PlainName]

That does make sense. After all, if it were primarily about the computer we'd be writing assembler, and that only because we just wouldn't be able to remember the hex codes for instructions.