Judge wrote:As a new coder i have never understood why people wouldn't document inline what each major block of code was doing, these comment lines just get thrown out by the compiler anyway, so no room is actually wasted.and when someone else goes to look, modify, or troubleshoot those comments and explanations can be a lifesaver, especially when there are so many lines of code to deal with. could anyone enlighten me as to why this wouldn't happen?
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Most developers, particularly in a project that is made of people contributing in their free time, intend to do things like proper documentation but often find themselves short on time, or they mean to come back to it and forget, or any other number of reasons. By far the largest reason I imagine is that most people in these types of projects don't always come from a professional or academic background and therefore don't have these types of practices ingrained in them.
That's something we're making a conscious effort to do and that's the most that can be done.