Hacker News Reader

Similar thoughts were seen in the SICP book.

"In this book we don't use many comments; we try to make our programs self-documenting by using descriptive names."

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-15.html...

From the era when two poles were Lisp and C, I can sort of see that. In part because of the preference for longer identifier names in Lisp, versus cryptic abbreviations in C, some kinds of comments prevalent in C aren't as necessarily in Lisp. Instead of atoi() you'd have something like convert-ascii-to-integer.

In modern Lisp, though, it's still considered good form to include both a docstring, and internal comments explaining anything particularly tricky.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com