The Case Against File Comments

Ville Laurikari, in an older post that recently made the Hacker News front page, talks about the evils of source-code templates:

Most projects have some kind of standard source code template which has the copyright and license text and placeholders for things like a description. All I have to say is: You don’t need a template. Stop using it.

He’s referring to things like this, found at the top of most source-code files:

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/*
 * File: filename.c
 * Author: Peter J. Vidler
 * Copyright (c) 2010.  All rights reserved.
 */

Actually, that one’s fairly trivial — see the actual post for much worse example. His post actually seems to be about file-level comments, rather than comment templates, but it’s still worth a read.

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