Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

It's actually a pretty nice example of the problems with overcommenting. For example, redundancy: "atexit(cleanup_children)" is perfectly self-explanatory, yet he repeats the same thing with the circumlocution "We setup our cleanup function as an exit handler which will be called at normal process termination." That's just a waste of both the writer and the reader's time.

And of course, redundancy spawns inconsistency: the code says "spawn_unquarantined_children()", but the comment says "All quarantined (a newly initialized child structure is quarantined by default) children is spawned for the first time." Which is it, quarantined or unquarantined? And the comment breaks number agreement, too.

I find it remarkably illustrative that comment rot has already set in into version 1.0 of a "359 LoC" program (actually 797, according to github).



I give him kudos for using atexit() at all; it's sorely underused.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: