re: #290 freetoken

Note on coding R: be sure to write at least 10 lines of comments for every line of executable, because after a couple of years it’s all too easy to forget what some arcane package for an unusual project truly does and why it does it.

I once worked closely with a brilliant coder whose code was amazingly concise, compiled tiny and ran super fast, but was often impossible to understand. For giggles I’d take some samples of his code to people with decades of coding experience and ask them what the code does. Usually got blank stares after a careful examination. Heck, in the time we worked together he wrote a bug report on the compiler; after it was fixed, we recovered significant real-time resources.

To your previous comment, his code was usually poorly documented and when there were comments, they were things like “This section explains why a raven is like a writing desk.”

Sigh.