Another thank you for posting this, made my day.
I have read and followed a fair amount of Uncle Bob’s work but was not aware of Ousterhout till now. Bob says during the time the Clean Code book was written there was an anti-comment sentiment about and this matches my own experience. I agree with Ousterhout that it’s taken too far in his book though.
I wonder if there is another factor at play - some people/cultures prefer high context communication and some less. Bob seems clearly to prefer low context i.e. the burden is on the (code) reader to educate themselves. Whereas John makes it a matter of professional behaviour that we make the next reader’s work as simple as possible by commenting code as appropriate.
Surely it’s better to assume high context is needed and provide it (within reason) versus only catering for low context. As Bob discovered he became a low context person when he returned to his own code after some time had passed.
Absolutely, if I remember right he leans back on having experienced bad comments more often than helpful ones. John questions this. I think it is close to dogma with Bob on this.
Quote from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context_cultures
Now I’m not making a strong claim that Bob and John are from different ends of the context spectrum. However it seems to me that Bob believes there is enough ‘context’ available in code and in coders themselves to communicate all meaning without comments.
Even Bob’s diagram, to help explain the primes algorithm, assumes high context in the reader. It’s lacking any labels or key - we are just supposed to see what he means if we stare hard enough at it. If we are already immersed in the problem space then this might work but its so inefficient for anyone else.
And once we step away from our code for even a short time we are that someone else. We are going to waste a lot of time rediscovering how the algorithm works. A case John makes convincingly I think.
Code cannot replace comments. The primes algorithm avoids division I believe but this is not clear from the code alone. A reader might work this out eventually but a comment saves so much time. Could the code be refactored to clearly express the avoidance of division? Yes there’s probably a way, but imagine how bad that code would read and what a waste of time just to avoid a comment.