Codetown ::: a software developer's community
Does anyone care to share their suggestions for documentation?
I'm asking because I recently had to change a program I wrote more than five years ago. I'd always thought that I've done a good job of documentation. But going through it was difficult. It WAS pulling apart an Excel in CSV format created and saved off by humans, so there was a lot of exception handling. But still . . . .
- Miek
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Generally I only put javadocs on public methods, especially ones that are used a lot. I use code comments sometimes, but generally if the code is hard to understand I take that as a "smell" that means you need to break down the code into more methods, refactor, or think about better naming.
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Created by Michael Levin Dec 18, 2008 at 6:56pm. Last updated by Michael Levin May 4, 2018.
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