Attached to this is a rather long article drawn from my dissertation research on the use of source-code comments in programming. Why is it published here rather than elsewhere? Well, the simple answer is that nobody else seems to want it. Technical communication journals--such as JBTC and IEEE PCS--both tell me that it's not something other tech comm folks would be interested in. I guess "soft" research is the norm, and empirical research is just not valuable. Perhaps if I'd performed a content analysis on the programmer's meeting notes instead of actually looking at their source-code I could have gotten it published elsewhere, but I digress.

I've also run into complications trying to get this published in other forms within the CS community. Performing beginning and end interviews, content analysis, and oberservations--all resulting in hundreds of pages of data--is not empirical enough for them. It doesn't mean anything if all this work is performed on only 5 participants, so they say. Okay.

In any case, when I drop out of academia in a couple of years it will be due to nonsense like this.

For the time being, the article can be downloaded as a PDF file because it is about 80 pages or so. Others have found it valuable in discussing how programmers really use commenting, and in suggesting why that may be. Enjoy.

The Rhetoric In the Code: What Programmers (Don't) Say To Each Other

Last update: 24-08-2008 20:26