Archive for September, 2006

Coding comments

Wednesday, September 27th, 2006

I’ve long favoured self-documenting code over code comments. But I’ve recently reconsidered the issue. After years of dealing with self-documenting code I’m beginning to see problems. With hindsight I’m less sure that self-documenting code is always the best way to go.

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Confirmation bias

Friday, September 15th, 2006

I recently read a paper on confirmation bias: the tendency to focus on information that corroborates theories and dismiss information that contradicts them. It explained a general problem that I’ve noticed with many scientific studies (particularly in the field of software development) but I hadn’t been able to identify.

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