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The latest Beta of GhostDoc introduces a new feature that makes XML documentation authoring a breeze – Visual Edition for XML Comments. The number one challenge authoring XML Comments that we heard from our users has been keeping the valid XML which includes encoding HTML formatting tags, code samples, etc. Many of these don’t even...
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For the last several years, I've made more and more of my living via entrepreneurial
pursuits. I started my career as a software developer and then worked my way
along that career path before leaving fulltime employment to do my own thing.
These days, I consult, but I also make training content, write books, and offer productized
services.
When you start to sell things yourself, you come to appreciate the value of marketing.
As a techie, this feels a little weird to say, but here we are. When you have
something of value to offer, marketing helps you make interested parties aware of
your offer. I think you'd like this and find it worth your money, if you
gave it a shot.
In pursuit of marketing, you can use all manner of techniques. But today, I'll
focus on a subtle one that involves generating a good reputation with those who do
buy your products. I want to talk about making good documentation.
The Marketing Importance of Documentation
This probably seems an odd choice for a marketing discussion. After all, most
of us think of marketing as what we do before a purchase to convince customers
to make that purchase. But repeat business from customer loyalty counts for
a lot. Your loyal customers provide recurring revenue and, if they love their
experience, they may evangelize for your brand.
Providing really great documentation makes an incredible difference for your product.
I say this because it can mean the difference between frustration and quick, easy
wins for your user base. And, from a marketing perspective, which do you think
makes them more likely to evangelize? Put yourself in their shoes. Would
you recommend something hard to figure out?
For a product with software developers as an end user, software documentation can
really go a long way. And with something like GhostDoc's "build help documentation"
feature, you can notch this victory quite easily. But the fact that you can
generate that documentation isn't what I want to talk about today, specifically.
Instead, I want to talk about going the extra mile by customizing it.
Introducing "Conceptual Content"
You can easily generate documentation for your API with the click of a button.
But you can also do a lot more.
GhostDoc Enterprise features something called "Conceptual Content." Basically,
it allows you to customize and add on to what the engine generates using your code
and XML doc comments. This comes in handy in ways limited only by your imagination,
but here are some ideas.
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A welcome page.
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A support page.
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A "what's new" page.
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Including a EULA/license.
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Custom branding.
You probably get the idea. If you already look to provide documentation for
your users, you no doubt have some good additional thoughts for what they might value.
Today, I'm going to show you the simplest way to get going with conceptual content
so that you can execute on these ideas of yours.
How It Works at a High Level
For GhostDoc to work its documentation-generating magic, it creates a file in your
solution directory named after your solution. For instance, with my
ChessTDD solution, it generates a file called "ChessTDD.sln.GhostDoc.xml."
If you crack open this file, you will see settings mirroring the ones you select in
Visual Studio when using GhostDoc's "Build Help Documentation."
To get this going, we face the task of basically telling this file about custom content
that we will create. First, close out of Visual Studio, and let's get to work
hacking at this thing a bit. We're going to add a simple, text-based welcome
page to the standard help documentation. To do this, we need the following things.
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Modifications to the GhostDoc XML file.
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The addition of a "content" file describing our custom content,
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Addition of a "content" folder containing the AML files that make up the actual, custom
pages.
Let's get started.
The Nuts and Bolts
First, open up the main GhostDoc XML file and look for the "ConceptualContent" section.
It looks like this.
<ConceptualContent> <ContentLayout /> <MediaContent /> </ConceptualContent>
In essence, this says, "no conceptual content here." We need to change that.
So, replace the empty ContentLayout entry with this (substituting the name of your
solution for "ChessTDD" if you want to follow along with your own instead of my ChessTDD
code.)
<ContentLayout file="ChessTDD.content" folder="Content\" />
Next up, you need to create the file you just told it about, ChessTDD.content.
This file goes in the same directory as your solution and looks like this.
<?xml version="1.0"
encoding="utf-8"?> <Topics> <Topic id="4684cc2f-3179-4871-b7a4-ad69f0f260a3" visible="True" isDefault="true" title="Welcome"> <HelpKeywords> <HelpKeyword index="K" term="Welcome" /> </HelpKeywords> </Topic> </Topics>
For the ID, I simply generated a GUI using
this site. This ID simply needs to be unique, and to match the next file
that we'll create. Next up, create the folder you told ContentLayout about called,
"Content." Then add the file Welcome.aml to that folder, with the following
text.
<?xml version="1.0"
encoding="utf-8"?> <topic id="4684cc2f-3179-4871-b7a4-ad69f0f260a3" revisionNumber="1"> <developerConceptualDocument xmlns="http://ddue.schemas.microsoft.com/authoring/2003/5" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <introduction> <para>Welcome
to our help section!</para> </introduction> </developerConceptualDocument> </topic>
Notice that we use the same GUID here as in the content file. We do this in
order to link the two.
Let's Give it a Whirl
With your marked up Ghost Doc XML file, the new content file, and the new Content
folder and welcome AML file, you can now re-launch Visual Studio. Open the solution
and navigate through GhostDoc to generate the help documentation CHM file.
There you have it. Now you can quickly add a page to the automatically generated
help documentation.
Keep in mind that I did the absolute, dead simplest possible thing I could do for
demonstration purposes. You can do much more. For example:
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Adding images/media to the pages.
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Have cross-links in there for reference.
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Add snippets and examples.
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Build lists and tables.
As I said earlier, you'll no doubt think of all manner of things to please your user
base with this documentation. I suggest getting in there, making it your own,
and leaving a nice, personal touch on things for them. When it comes to providing
a good user experience, a little can go a long way.
Related resources
Learn
how GhostDoc can help to simplify your XML Comments, produce and maintain quality
help documentation.
About the Author
Erik Dietrich
I'm a passionate software developer and active blogger. Read about me at my
site. View
all posts by Erik Dietrich
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If you haven't lived in a techie cave the last 10 years, you've probably noticed JavaScript's
rise to prominence. Actually, forget prominence. JavaScript has risen
to command consideration as today's lingua
franca of modern software development.
I find it sort of surreal to contemplate that, given my own backstory. Years
(okay, almost 2 decades) ago, I cut my teeth with C and C++. From there, I branched
out to Java, C#, Visual Basic, PHP, and some others I'm probably forgetting.
Generally speaking, I came of age during the heyday of object oriented programming.
Oh, sure I had awareness of other paradigms. In college, I had dabbled with
(at the time) the esoteric concept of functional programming. And I supplemented
"real" programming work with scripts as needed to get stuff done. But object-oriented
languages gave us the real engine that drove serious work.
JavaScript fell into the "scripting" category for me, when I first encountered it,
probably around 2001 or 2002. It and something called VBScript competed
for the crown of "how to do weird stuff in the browser, half-baked hacky languages."
JavaScript one that battle and cemented itself in my mind as "the thing to do when
you want an alert box in the browser."
Even as it has risen to prominence and inspired a generation of developers, I suppose
I've never really shed my original baggage with it. While I conceptually understand
its role as "assembly language of the web," I have a hard time not seeing the language
that was written
in 10 days and named to deliberately confuse people.
GhostDoc, Help, and IntelliSence
I lead with all of this to help you understand the lens through which to read this
post. As a product of the strongly typed, object-oriented wave of programmers,
my subconscious still regards JavaScript as something of an afterthought, its dominance
notwithstanding. And so when I see advances in the JavaScript world, I tend
to think, "Oh, cool, you can do that with JavaScript too!"
I'll come back to that shortly. But first, I'd like to remind you of a prominent
GhostDoc feature. Specifically, I'm referring to the "Document This" capability.
With your cursor inside of a method or type, you can use this capability to generate
instant, well-formatted, XML doc comments. Thoroughly documented code sits just
a "Ctrl-Shift-D" away.
If you work with C# a lot and generate public APIs and/or help documentation, you
will love this capability. It doesn't absolve you of needing to add specific
contest. But it does give you a thorough base upon which to build. For
example, consider this method from my ChessTDD example
codebase.
/// <summary> /// Gets
the moves from. /// </summary> /// <param
name="startingLocation">The starting location.</param> /// <param
name="boardSize">Size of the board.</param> /// <returns>IEnumerable<BoardCoordinate>.</returns> public override IEnumerable<BoardCoordinate> GetMovesFrom(BoardCoordinate
startingLocation, int boardSize = Board.DefaultBoardSize)
{ var oneSquareAwayMoves = GetAllRadialMovesFrom(startingLocation, 1); return oneSquareAwayMoves.Where(bc => bc.IsCoordinateValidForBoardSize(boardSize));
}
I took that un-commented method and used GhostDoc to generate this. Now, I Should
probably update the summary, but I really don't see any other deficiencies here.
It nails the parameter names, and it even escapes the generic return type for readability.
It Works with JavaScript, Too
Now, as I've said earlier, I don't really play much in the JavaScript world.
I generally focus on application code and server side stuff, delving into the realm
of the client side browser only when necessary to get things done. So you can
imagine my reaction to learn that GhostDoc can do this with JavaScript too.
It can produce sophisticated XML doc comments that allow for use in generating help
and with IntelliSence.
Actually, if I really want to embarrass myself, I'll confess that my initial reaction
was, "JavaScript code has IntelliSence?" I think maybe I knew that, but I assumed
that such a thing would offer little value in a dynamically typed language.
Shows what I know. But then, once I got over that initial wave of ignorance,
I thought, "cool!" at the idea that you could generate documentation for JavaScript.
I then wondered if well-documented JavaScript was more or less rare than well documented
C#. That jury has yet to come back, as far as I know.
Let's Take a Look
Let's take a look at what GhostDoc actually does here. To demonstrate, I created a
branch of my ChessTDD project, to which I added an ASP MVC front end. This
plopped some JavaScript right in my lap, in the form of the default files in the "Scripts"
folder. To see this in action, I popped open modernizr-2.6.2.js and found a
method upon which to experiment.
ShivMethods sounded... interesting, in a prison yard sort of way.
As a publicly consumable library, it already has documentation. And, as I learned
by playing around, that documentation already gets picked up by IntelliSense.
But I figured I'd see what happened by using GhostDoc anyway, for comparison's sake.
So I lazily put my cursor randomly inside the method and fired away with a Ctrl-Shift-D.
Check it out.
As you can see, GhostDoc puts the comment inside of the method and behaves largely
as it would with C#. In case you're wondering about the stylistic difference,
GhostDoc does this because it's the
more Microsoft-preferred way. To underscore that, look what happens now
when we consume this method with IntelliSense.
As you can see, IntelliSense gives preference to the comments generated by GhostDoc.
The Takeaway
What's my main point here? I simply wanted to share that you can use GhostDoc
for JavaScript just as you can with C# or VB.
Forget about my crotchety ways and biases. Your JavaScript/client-side code
is every bit as important as what you write anywhere else. You should treat
it as such when documenting it, creating help for it, and making sure users know how
to consume your libraries. So make sure you've got Ctrl-Shift-D at the ready
when using Visual Studio, regardless of where the code gets executed.
Learn
more about how GhostDoc can help simplify your XML Comments, produce and maintain
quality help documentation.
About the Author
Erik Dietrich
I'm a passionate software developer and active blogger. Read about me at my
site. View
all posts by Erik Dietrich
|
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We are looking for your input and we're willing to bribe you for answering one very
simple question: What are your biggest code documentation challenges right now?
The survey is super-quick and we're offering a $20 discount code for
your time (good with any new SubMain product license purchase) that you will automatically
receive once you complete the survey as our thank you.
We'd also appreciate it if you'd help us out by tweeting about this using the link Share
on Twitter or otherwise letting folks know we're interested to know their code
documentation challenges.
Thanks for your help!
 
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If you spend enough years writing software, sooner or later, your chosen vocation
will force you into reverse engineering. Some weird API method with an inscrutable
name will stymie you. And you'll have to plug in random inputs and examine the
outputs to figure out what it does.
 Clearly,
this wastes your time. Even if you enjoy the detective work, you can't argue
that an employer or client would view this as efficient. Library and API code
should not require you to launch a mystery investigation to determine what it does.
Instead, such code should come with appropriate documentation. This documentation
should move your focus from wondering what the code does to contemplating how best
to leverage it. It should make your life easier.
But what constitutes appropriate documentation? What particular characteristics
does it have? In this post, I'd like to lay out some elements of helpful code
documentation.
Elements of Style
Before moving on to what the documentation should contain, I will speak first about
its stylistic properties. After all, poorly written documentation can tank understanding,
even if it theoretically contains everything it should. If you're going to write
it, make it good.
Now don't get me wrong -- I'm not suggesting you should invest enough time to make
it a literary masterpiece. Instead, focus on three primary characteristics of
good writing: clarity, correctness, and precision. You want to make sure that
readers understand exactly what you're talking about. And, obviously, you cannot
get anything wrong.
The importance of this goes beyond just the particular method in question. It
affects your entire credibility with your userbase. If you confuse them with
ambiguity or, worse, get something wrong, they will start to mistrust you. The
documentation becomes useless to them and your reputation suffers.
Examples
Once you've gotten your house in order with stylistic concerns in the documentation,
you can decide on what to include. First up, I cannot overstate the importance
of including examples.
Whether you find yourself documenting a class, a method, a web service call, or anything
else, provide examples. Show the users the code in action and let them
apply their pattern matching and deduction skills. In case you hadn't noticed,
programmers tend to have these in spades.
Empathize with the users of your code. When you find yourself reading manuals
and documentation, don't you look for examples? Don't you prefer to grab them
and tweak them to suit your current situation? So do the readers of your documentation.
Oblige them. (See <example
/>)
Conditions
Next up, I'll talk about the general consideration of "conditions." By this,
I mean three basic types of conditions: preconditions,
postconditions, and invariants.
Let me define these in broad terms so that you understand what I mean. Respectively,
preconditions, postconditions, and invariants are things that must be true before
your code executes, things that must be true after it executes, and things that must
remain true throughout.
Documenting this information for your users saves them trial and error misery.
If you leave this out, they may have to discover for themselves that the method won't
accept a null parameter or that it never returns a positive number. Spare them
that trial and error experimentation and make this clear. By telling them explicitly,
you help them determine up front whether this code suits their purpose or not. (See <remarks
/> and <note
/>)
Related Elements
Moving out from core principles a bit, let's talk about some important meta-information.
People don't always peruse your documentation in "lookup" mode, wanting help about
a code element whose name they already know. Instead, sometimes they will 'surf'
the documentation, brainstorming the best way to tackle a problem.
For instance, imagine that you want to design some behavior around a collection type.
Familiar with List, you look that up, but then maybe you poke around to see what inherits
from the same base or implements the same interface. By doing this, you hope
to find the perfect collection type to suit your needs.
Make this sort of thing easy on readers of your documentation by offering a concept
of "related" elements. Listing OOP classes in the same hierarchy represents
just one example of what you might do. You can also list all elements with a
similar behavior or a similar name. You will have to determine for yourself
what related elements make sense based on context. Just make sure to include
them, though. (See <seealso
/> )
Pitfalls and Gotchas
Last, I'll mention an oft-overlooked property of documentation. Most commonly,
you might see this when looking at the documentation for some API call. Often,
it takes the form of "exceptions thrown" or "possible error codes."
But I'd like to generalize further here to "pitfalls and gotchas." Listing out
error codes and exceptions is great because it lets users know what to expect when
things go off the rails. But these aren't the only ways that things can go wrong,
nor are they the only things of which users should be aware.
Take care to list anything out here that might violate the principle
of least surprise or that could trip people up. This might include things
like, "common ways users misuse this method" or "if you get output X, check that you
set Y correctly." You can usually populate this section pretty easily whenever
a user struggles with the documentation as-is.
Wherever you get the pitfalls, just be sure to include them. Believe it or not,
this kind of detail can make the difference between adequate and outstanding documentation.
Few things impress users as much as you anticipating their questions and needs. (See <exception
/>, <returns
/> and <remarks
/>)
Documentation Won't Fix Bad Code
In closing, I would like to offer a thought that returns to the code itself.
Writing good documentation is critically important for anyone whose code will be consumed
by others -- especially those selling their code. But it all goes for naught
should you write bad or buggy code, or should your API present a mess to your users.
Thus I encourage you to apply the same scrutiny to the usability of your API that
I have just encouraged you to do for your documentation. Look to ensure that
you offer crisp, clear abstractions. Name code elements appropriately.
Avoid surprises to your users.
Over the last decade or so, organizations like Apple have moved us away from hefty
user manuals in favor of "discoverable" interfaces. Apply the same principle
to your code. I tell you this not to excuse you from documentation, but to help
you make your documentation count. When your clean API serves as part of your
documentation, you will write less of it, and what you do write will have higher value
to readers.
Learn
more about how GhostDoc can help simplify your XML Comments, produce and maintain
quality help documentation.
About the Author
Erik Dietrich
I'm a passionate software developer and active blogger. Read about me at my
site. View
all posts by Erik Dietrich
|
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Before I get down to the brass tacks of how to do some interesting stuff, I'm going
to spin a tale of woe. Well, I might have phrased that a little strongly.
Call it a tale of corporate drudgery.
In any case, many years ago I worked briefly in a little department, at a little company
that seemed to be a corporate drudgery factory. Oh, the place and people weren't
terrible. But the work consisted of, well, drudgery. We 'consulted' in
the sense that we cranked out software for other companies, for pay. Our software
plumbed the lines of business between client CRMs and ERPs or whatever. We would
write the software, then finish the software, then hand the software over, source
code and all.
Naturally, commenting our code and compliance with the coding standard attained crucial
importance. Why? Well, no practical reason. It was just that clients
would see this code. So it needed to look professional. Or something.
It didn't matter what the comments said. It didn't matter if the standard made
sense. Compliance earned you a gold star and a move onto the next project.
As I surveyed the scene surrounding me, I observed a mountain of vacuous comments
and dirty, but uniform code.
My Complex Relationship with Code Comments
My brief stay with (and departure from) this organization coincided with my growing
awareness of the Software Craftsmanship movement. Even as they copy and pasted
their way toward deadlines and wrote comments announcing that while(x < 6) would
proceed while x was less than 6, I became interested in the idea of the self-documenting
code.
Up to that point, I had diligently commented each method, file, and type I encountered.
In this regard, I looked out for fellow and future programmers. But after one
too many occasions of watching my own comments turn into lies when someone changed
the code without changing the comments, I gave up. I stopped commenting my code,
focusing entirely on extractions, refactoring, and making my code as legible as possible.
I achieved an equilibrium of sorts. In this fashion, I did less work and stopped
seeing my comments become nasty little fibs. But a single, non-subtle flaw remained
in this absolutist approach. What about documentation of a public (or internal)
API?
Naturally, I tried to apply the craftsmanship-oriented reasoning unilaterally.
Just make the public API so discoverable as to render the issue moot. But that
never totally satisfied me because I still liked my handy help screens and IntelliSense
info when consuming others' code.
And so I came to view XML doc comments on public methods as an exception. These,
after all, did not represent "comments." They came packaged with your deliverables
as your product. And I remain comfortable with that take today.
Generating Help More Efficiently
Now, my nuanced evolved view doesn't automatically mean I'll resume laboriously hand-typing
XML comments. Early in my career, a sort of sad pride in this "work harder,
not smarter" approach characterized my development. But who has time for that
anymore?
Instead, with a little bit of investment in learning and tooling, you can do some
legitimately cool stuff. Let me take you through a nifty sequence of steps that
you may come to love.
GhostDoc Enterprise
First up, take a look at the
GhostDoc Enterprise offering. Among other things, this product
lets you quickly generated XML comments, customize the default generation template,
spell check your code, generate help documentation and more. Poking through
all that alone will probably take some time out of your day. You should download
and play with the product.
Once you are done with that, though, consider how you might get more efficient at
beefing up your API. For the rest of this post, I will use as an example my
Chess TDD project. I use this as a toy codebase for all kinds of demos.
I never commented this codebase, nor did I generate any kind of documentation for
it. Why? I intended it solely as a teaching tool for test-driven development,
and never packaged it for others' consumption. Let's change that today.
Adding Comments
Armed with GhostDoc enterprise, I will first generate some comments. The Board class
makes a likely candidate since that offers theoretical users the most value.
First up, I need to add XML doc comments to the file. I can do this by right
clicking in the file, and selecting "Document Type" from the GhostDoc Enterprise context
menu. Here's what the result looks like.
The default template offers a pretty smart guess at intent, based on good variable
naming. For my fellow clean code enthusiasts out there, you can even check how
self-documenting your code is by the quality of the comments GhostDoc creates.
But still, you probably want to take a human pass through, checking and tweaking where
needed.
Building Help Documentation
All right. With comments in place for the public facing API of my little project,
we can move on to the actual documentation. Again, easy enough. Select
"Tools -> GhostDoc Enterprise -> Build Help Documentation" from the main menu.
You'll see this screen.
Notice that you have a great deal of control over the particulars. Going into
detail here is beyond the scope of my post, but you can certainly play around.
I'll take the defaults and build a CHM help file. Once I click "OK", here's
what I see (once I go to the board class).
Pretty slick, huh? Seriously. With just a few clicks, you get intelligently
commented public methods and a professional-looking help file. (You can also
have this as web-style documentation if you want). Obviously, I'd want to do
some housekeeping here if I were selling this, but it does a pretty good job even
with zero intervention from me.
Do It From the Build
Only one bit of automation remains at this point. And that's the generation
of this documentation from the build. Fortunately, GhostDoc Enterprise makes
that simple as well.
Any build system worth its salt will, of course, let you hook command line invocations
into your build. GhostDoc Enterprise offers one up for just this occasion.
You can read a
succinct guide on that right here. With a single command, you can point
it at your solution, a help configuration, and a project configuration, and generate
the help file. Putting it where you want is then easy enough.
Tying this in with an automated build or CI setup really ties everything together,
including the theme of this post. Automating the generation of clean, helpful
documentation of your clean code, building it, and packaging it up all without human
intervention pretty much represents the pinnacle of delivering a professional product.
Learn
more about how GhostDoc can help simplify your XML Comments, produce and maintain
quality help documentation.
About the Author
Erik Dietrich
I'm a passionate software developer and active blogger. Read about me at my
site. View
all posts by Erik Dietrich
|
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Think back to college (or high school, if applicable). Do you remember that
kid that would sit near the front of the class and gleefully point out that the professor
had accidentally omitted an apostrophe when writing notes on the white board?
Didn't you just love that kid? Yeah, me neither.
Fate imbues a small percentage of the population with a neurotic need to correct any
perceived mistakes made by anyone. XKCD immortalized this phenomenon with one
of its most famous cartoons, that declared, "someone
is wrong on the internet." For the rest of the population, however, this
tendency seems pedantic and, dare I say, unpleasant. Just let it go, man.
It doesn't matter that much.
I mention all of this to add context to the remainder of the post. I work as
a consultant and understand the need for diplomacy, tact, and choosing one's battles.
So, I do not propose something like care with spelling lightly. But I will propose
it, nonetheless.
Now I know what you're thinking. How can caring about spelling in code be anything
but pedantic? We're not talking about something being put together to impress
a wide audience, like a newspaper. In fact, we're not even talking about prose.
And code contains all sorts of abbreviations and encodings and whatnot.
Nevertheless, it matters. When English words occur in your code, spelling them
right matters. I'll use the rest of this post to make my case.
The IntelliSense Conundrum
If you use Visual Studio, no doubt you make heavy use of IntelliSense.
To expand, any IDE or text editor with autocomplete functionality qualifies for consideration
here. In either case, your tooling gives you a pretty substantial boost by suggesting
methods/variables/classes/etc based on what you have typed. It's like type-ahead
for code.
Now think of the effect a misspelling can have here, particularly near the beginning
of a word. Imagine implementing a method that would release resources and accidentally
typing Colse instead of Close.
Now imagine consuming that method. If you're used to exploring APIs and available
methods with auto-complete, you might type, "Clo", pause, and see no matching methods.
You might then conclude, "hey, no call to Close needed!"
In all likelihood, such an error would result in a few minutes of head-scratching
and then the right call. But even if that's the worst of it, that's still not
great. And it will happen each and every time someone uses your code.
Other Manual Typing Errors
The scope of this particular issue goes beyond auto-complete functionality.
Perhaps you lack that functionality in your environment, or perhaps you simply don't
use it much. In that case, you'll be hand typing your code.
Now, imagine hand typing the call above to a close method. Do you instinctively
type "Colse" or do you instinctively type "Close?" So what do you think will
happen?
You'll expect the call to be Close and you'll type that. Then, you'll stare
in disbelief for a moment at the compiler message. You'll probably do a clean
and rebuild. You'll stare again for a while and squint. Then, finally,
you'll smack your forehead, realize the problem, and silently berate the person who
misspelled the method name.
Again, the impact remains the same. Most likely this creates only friction and
annoyance. Every now and then, it may trigger a thoroughly incorrect use of
a library or API.
Anchoring Effect
Moving away from the theme of confusion when using a declared member, consider the
declaration itself. During the use of a variable/method/class/etc, you must
spell it right before the compiler allows you to proceed (assuming a strongly typed
language). With the original declaration, however, you have the freedom to spell
things wrong to your heart's content. When you do this, the original copy holds
the error.
That first misspelling allows for easy correction. Same goes when you've used
it only a time or two. But as usage grows and spreads throughout the codebase,
the fix becomes more and more of a chore. Before long (and without easy refactoring
tools), the chore becomes more than anyone feels like tackling, and the error calcifies
in place.
Your unaddressed spelling mistake today makes fixes more difficult tomorrow.
Comprehension Confusion
Let's switch gears again and consider the case of a maintenance programmer reading
for comprehension. After all, programmers do a whole lot more reading of code
than they do modification of it. So, a casual read is a likely situation.
Spelling errors cloud comprehension. A simple transposition of characters or
a common error, such as referring to a "dependency" do not present an insurmountable
problem. But a truly mangled word can leave readers scratching their heads and
wondering what the code actually means, almost as if you'd left some kind of brutal
Hungarian notation in there.
Taking the time to get the spelling right ensures that anyone maintaining the code
will not have this difficulty. Code is hard enough to understand, as-is, without
adding unforced errors to the mix.
The Embarrassment Factor
And, finally, there's the embarrassment factor. And I don't mean the embarrassment
of your coworkers saying, "wow, that guy doesn't know how to spell!" I'm talking
about the embarrassment factor for the team.
Think of new developers hiring on or transferring into the group. They're going
to take a look at the code and draw conclusions, about your team. Software developers
tend to have exacting, detail-oriented minds, and they tend to notice mistakes.
Having a bunch of spelling mistakes in common words makes it appear either that the
team doesn't know how to spell or that it has a sloppy approach. Neither of
those is great.
But also keep in mind that what happens in the code doesn't always stay in the code.
Bits of the code you write might appear on team dashboards, build reports, unit test
run outputs, etc. People from outside of the team may be examining acceptance
tests and the like. And, you may have end-user documentation generated automatically
using your code (i.e. if you make developer tools or APIs). Do you really want
the documentation you hand to your customers to contain embarrassing mistakes?
It's Easy to Get Right
At this point, I'm finished with the supply of arguments for making the case.
I've laid these out.
But, by way of closing words, I'd like to comment on what might be the biggest shame
of the whole thing. Purging your code of spelling errors doesn't require you
to be an expert speller. It doesn't require you to copy source code into MS
Word or something and run a check. You have tools at your disposal that will
do this for you, right
in your IDE. All you need to do is turn them on.
I recommend that you do this immediately. It's easy, unobtrusive, and offers
only upside. And not only will you excise spelling mistakes from your code --
you'll also prevent that annoying kid in the front of the class from bothering you
about stuff you don't have time for.
Learn
more about GhostDoc's truly source code spell checker and eliminate embarrassing
typos in your apps and documentation before you ship them.
About the Author
Erik Dietrich
I'm a passionate software developer and active blogger. Read about me at my
site. View
all posts by Erik Dietrich
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Notwithstanding some oddball calculator and hobby PC hacking, my first serious programming
experience came in college. A course called "Intro to C++" got us acquainted
with arrays, loops, data structures and the like. Given its introductory nature,
this class did not pose a particularly serious challenge (that would come later).
So, with all of the maturity generally possessed by 18 year olds, we had a bit of
fun.
I recall contests to see how much application logic we could jam into the loop conditions,
and contests to see how much code could be packed onto one line. These sorts
of scavenger hunt activities obviously produced dense, illegible code. But then,
that was kind of the point.
Beyond these silly hijinks, however, a culture of code illegibility permeated this
(and, I would learn later) other campuses. Professors nominally encouraged code
readability. After all, such comments facilitated partial credit in the event
of a half-baked homework submission. But, even still, the mystique of the ingenious
but inscrutable algorithm pervaded the culture both for students and faculty.
I had occasion to see code written by various professors, and I noticed no comments
that I can recall.
Professionalism via Thoroughness
When I graduated from college, I carried this culture with me. But not for long.
I took a job where I spent most of my days working on driver and kernel module programming.
There, I noticed that the grizzled veterans to whom I looked up meticulously documented
their code. Above each function sat a neat, orderly comment containing information
about its purpose, parameters, return values, and modification history.
This, I realized, was how professionals conducted themselves. I was hooked.
Fresh out of college, and looking to impress the world, I sought to distinguish myself
from my undisciplined student ways. This decision ushered in a period of many
years in which I documented my code with near religious fervor.
My habit included, obviously, the method headers that I emulated. But on top
of that, I added class headers and regularly peppered my code with line comments that
offered such wisdom as "increment the loop counter until the end of the array."
(Okay, probably not that bad, but you get the idea). I also wrote lengthy readme
documents for posterity and maintenance programmers alike. My professionalism
knew no bounds.
Clean Code as Plot Twist
Eventually, I moved on from that job, but carried my habits with me. I wrote
different code for different purposes in different domains, but stayed consistent
in my commenting diligence. This I wore as a badge of pride.
While I was growing in my career, I started to draw inspiration from the clean code
movement. I began to write unit tests, I practiced the SOLID
principles, I watched Uncle Bob talks, made my methods small, and sought to convince
others to do the same. Through it all, I continued to write comments.
But then something disconcerting happened. In the clean code circles I followed
and aspired to, I started to see posts
like this one. In it, the author had written extensively about comments
as a code smell.
Comments are a great example of something that seems like a Good Thing, but turn out
to cause more harm than good.
For a while, I dismissed this heresy as an exception to the general right-thinking
of the clean code movement. I ignored it. But it nagged at me nonetheless,
and eventually, I had to confront it.
When I finally did, I realized that I had continued to double down on a practice simply
because I had done it for so long. In other words, the extensive commenting
represented a ritual of diligence rather than something in which I genuinely saw value.
Down with Comments
Once the floodgates had opened, I did an about-face. I completely stopped writing
comments of any sort whatsoever, unless it was part of the standard of the group I
was working with.
The clean coder rationale flooded over me and made sense. Instead of writing
inline comments, make the code self-documenting. Instead of comments in general,
write unit and acceptance tests that describe the desired behaviors. If you
need to explain in English what your code does, you have failed to explain with your
code.
Probably most compelling of all, though, was the tendency that I'd noticed for comments
to rot. I cannot begin to estimate how many times I dutifully wrote comments
about a method, only to return a year later and see that the method had been changed
while the comments had not. My once-helpful comments now lied to anyone reading
them, making me look either negligent or like an idiot. Comments represented
duplication of knowledge, and duplication of knowledge did what it always does: gets
out of sync.
My commenting days were over.
Best of All Worlds
That still holds true to this day. I do not comment my code in the traditional
sense. Instead, I write copious amounts of unit, integration and acceptance
tests to demonstrate intent. And, where necessary and valuable, I generate documentation.
Let's not confuse documentation and commenting. Commenting code targets maintenance
programmers and team members as the intended audience. Documenting, on the other
hand, targets external consumers. For instance, if I maintained a library at
a large organization, and other teams used that library, they would be external consumers
rather than team members. In effect, they constitute customers.
If we think of API consumers as customers, then generating examples and documentation
becomes critically important. In a sense, this activity is the equivalent of
designing an intuitive interface for end-users of a GUI application. They need
to understand how to quickly and effectively make the most of what you offer.
So if you're like me -- if you believe firmly in the tenets of the clean code movement
-- understand that comments and documentation are not the same thing. Also understand
that documentation has real, business value and occupies an important role in what
we do. Documentation may take the form of actual help documents, files, or XML-doc
style comments that appear in IntelliSense implementations.
To achieve the best of all worlds, avoid duplication. Make publishing documentation
and examples a part of your process and, better yet, automate these activities.
Your code will stay clean and maintainable and your API users will be well-informed
and empowered to use your code.
Learn
more about how GhostDoc can help simplify your XML Comments, produce and maintain
quality help documentation.
About the Author
Erik Dietrich
I'm a passionate software developer and active blogger. Read about me at my
site. View
all posts by Erik Dietrich
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