Joe Armstrong on “Rhetorical Structure of Code”

Unfortunately the structure (which process starts another process) which
protocol is obeyed is implicit in code and not explicit. Code that starts with a comment

%% This code implements the protocol described in [Ref]

Is great

The kind of structure I’m interested in can, I think, be
described as *rhetorical* structure, like relationships
between paragraphs. In code reviews I would ask “how does this work” or “what’s the most
important stuff” …

Robert Virding (Blessed be his name) once wrote a very long
module for pattern matching with exactly one comment:

%% And now for the tricky bit

It was nice to know …

[I warned you]

Cheers

/Joe

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