We begin to see the nature of comments pervading through our modern technology. While originally intended for cooperation between programmers, it's pivoting in strange and as Haas would say, "cussed" ways. We really get a picture of comments being used for non-purposed means in a brief exchange on stack overflow. Favorited over 4,700 times, this innocuous thread simply asked the question, "What is the best comment in source code you have ever encountered."
The results were amusing and "historically significant"
" I am particularly guilty of this, embedding non-constructive comments, code poetry and little jokes into most of my projects (although I usually have enough sense to remove anything directly offensive before releasing the code). Here's one I'm particularly fond of, placed far, far down a poorly-designed 'God Object':
/** For the brave souls who get this far: You are the chosen ones, the valiant knights of programming who toil away, without rest, fixing our most awful code. To you, true saviors, kings of men, I say this: never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and desert you. Never gonna make you cry, never gonna say goodbye. Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you. */ " Jens Roland.
This really does paint the picture of how commenting has changed and continues to change as time progresses. Likewise, we see it begin to pivot in a corporate environment as well. Through the Internet Society website, we are given a picture of how code has become more commercialized. The importance of a scalable and accessible website is not something to be marginalized. In fact, "vendors worked extremely hard to ensure that everyone's products interoperated with all the other products - even with those of their competitors.".
This is a picture of how common-place, or unstructured people have begun to take the comment element. While it was originally intended to serve as a way to communicate ideas to fellow content creators, the element is now being used to mark territory or placement, almost like a dog urinating against a wall.
Another interesting approach to commenting is found on hackthissite.org. Created in the early 200s, this website was dedicated towards the advancement of 'white - hat' hackers, who would developed their skills. Their first tutorial was to initiate the user with source code! In order to get to the next 'hack'. The user would have to find a specific code on their website. By encouraging the user to look through the source code and find the commented out 'code', the user was able to progress further on. None of the original creators ever intended the comment element to be used as a tool for a scavenger hunt, but there it is!
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