www.greg-wright.co.uk

I've always thought that the best programmers have the worst memories. The reason is simple. If you have a bad memory you have to write your code in a way that you will understand it in the future. If you have a good memory you can do what you like, give variables stupid names, make the code as unreadable as you like - you can rely on your memory to help you out when you revisit the code.

There is something of an art to writing and commenting code, because its a team game. Not only does your code have to work but it is essential that anyone who reads it can understand it, without it taking them longer to understand it than it took you to write it in the first place. If you write code that nobody else can understand then there is really no point in writing the code. All that can be done is to wrap some unit tests round your code and refactor it to literacy.

Unit tests are a good way of "documenting" code. At least they give usage examples which can help enormously.