Rethinking Code Comments

Justin Duke came up with a clever idea: can treat code comments as footnotes help us better understand code files? In his design prototype, all comments are hidden by default and need to be clicked to display.

This idea is awesome! Justin’s design reminds me of the way Instapaper handles inline footnotes.

The reason I like this idea so much is probably because many of the comments don't need to be read often - they're more like a reminder, "Hey, this needs improvement in the future" or "Oh, that's weird, I'm sorry". Removing these comments from the code also makes scanning the entire file much easier.

I'm curious if it's possible to add a toggle button that shows all the comments in case you need to read all the comments in order, rather than toggle one by one.

In short, all the discussions about comments remind me of a great speech by Sarah Drasner on JSConf this year, in which she discussed why comments are so difficult to write:

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