[swift-evolution] [Proposal] Replace all Swift comments by end notes.

[Charlie Monroe]

> On Jan 16, 2017, at 5:38 PM, Amir Michail via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Jan 16, 2017, at 10:55 AM, Tony Allevato <tony.allevato at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> As a general rule of thumb, changes to the language should not require the use of an IDE in order to return them back to the level of usability that was had before the change. Swift is not a Mac/Xcode-only language, and even on that platform, there are a number of times where I personally find myself working in Sublime Text instead of Xcode, for various reasons.
>> 
> 
> One could argue that those using a simple editor that can't hide comments would benefit more from this proposal.

Not really, unless you work with code that you are very familiar with. Imagine jumping up and down a 1000 LOC file and looking up what a method does. That's fairly insane...

> 
>> Regarding this idea specifically, I think it would simply discourage users from writing comments at all, without necessarily any improvement in code quality. The developers who already write self-explanatory code will continue to do so, and those who write bad code and don't comment will also continue to do so. Do you have any evidence that making commenting harder would improve code quality?
>> 
>> On Mon, Jan 16, 2017 at 7:28 AM Amir Michail via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>> Why not replace all Swift comments by end notes at the end of each source file so as to minimize the impact of misleading/outdated comments on code comprehension?
>> 
>> You don’t necessarily need to scroll to the end of the source file to read a referenced end note in the code since the IDE could show a popup whenever the mouse pointer lingers over an end note reference (e.g., a number/label).
>> 
>> Maybe this would encourage programmers to write more self-explanatory code while keeping (end note) comments to a minimum?
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