Well, quantity can be measured in different ways. I didn't say "your (individual) comments are too long"; I said "you have too many comments" (aka the total length of your comments is comparable to the total length of your code... i.e., your source files are on average more comments than code). Too many comments (even short ones) is generally bad; they make the code harder to read, not easier. A few long comments are generally good. I feel like you were addressing a different point than I was making.
> Too many comments (even short ones) is generally bad;
That's exactly what I'm refuting, so I'm not sure why you keep talking past me. I am speaking to the crazy notion that there is a par for the comment golf course, and we all have to be Goldilocks as we write software. I don't know where that started, but I'd love it if people stopped judging software based upon the non-executable portions.
A line before every line? Maybe. Are they comments of quality? I've put a comment on every line of assembly before as a postfix. There is no hard and fast rule on this, and I wish people would stop trying to make one.
Again, literate programming. I feel like you're missing how serious I am about this by overlooking my repeated love for it.
Well in that case, there's nothing crazy about it. If I can hire someone whose code is reasonably self-explanatory vs. someone who puts comments all over their code (whether or not it's self-explanatory), I'm certainly not going to choose the second one over the first one, not sure about you.
You just said if I took the same self-explanatory code and added comments to it that you deem unnecessary you'd no-hire me as a result. And yes, that is absolutely crazy, and has been my point throughout this entire thread.
Please do me the respect of researching literate programming before attempting to extend this thread, because I can tell you're unfamiliar, just based on how many ways you're trying to slice and dice a chink in my opinion on this.
Notice I never even mentioned the phrase "literate programming" when responding to you? It's because I'm not trying to debate programming philosophy here, I'm trying to address a practical/immediate concern of the OP. I can debate with you day and night about what programming methodology is best, but that's not what the question here has been about, and I'm doing my best not to divert the discussion into a different direction.
The debate has been about why the OP's code was considered poor by the employer, and I think putting too many comments might have been such a reason. Whether or not you think putting too many comments is good or bad is orthogonal to whether or not it might have been a reason for rejecting the OP as a candidate. I think it's a reason for avoiding hiring the OP (see my previous discussion about productivity and wasting time writing comments), and whether you feel it's actually justified by some "good" coding methodology is orthogonal to whether or not the employer might have used the same rationale as me, and that's all I'm trying to address here. If you feel the employer's rationale was unjustified or crazy, then so be it; that doesn't mean the employer couldn't have had this thought process anyway.
This entire subthread for 45 minutes, me talking to you, has been me talking about programming philosophy with you. OP left my mind on this a long time ago. By your examples, I felt like you were coming along with me (two arbitrary candidates, for example), so I don't even know what we're doing here.
