[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20210226004600/http://antirez.co... (I still don't understand why he deleted his blog)
It's quite a bit easier to write something the compiler or runtime can understand, there's no need for meaningful names, consistent structure, or conceptual coherence. As long as it builds and passes whatever tests, the computer will accept it.
Isn't the answer to that obvious? The code is significantly constrained in form by having to be executable. The comments have no such restriction.
> You may think that writing comments is a lesser noble form of work. After all you can code! However consider this: code is a set of statement and function calls, or whatever your programming paradigm is. Sometimes such statements do not make much sense, honestly, if the code is not good. Comments require always to have some design process ongoing, and to understand the code you are writing in a deeper sense. On top of that, in order to write good comments, you have to develop your writing skills. The same writing skills will assist you writing emails, documentation, design documents, blog posts, and commit messages.
In any case, you're making a good point, though I would argue that the reverse of the saying (with the modification that "expectations" get replaced with "trust") also holds:
If someone is not able to write intelligible, stringent English, I wouldn't trust them to write good code, either, because writing good code requires similar qualities (good stringent structure, empathizing with the future reader of your code etc.) and, as antirez argues convincingly, it also requires writing comments (which are in plain English).
[1]: https://twitter.com/KevlinHenney/status/381021802941906944
The comments don't say the same thing as the code. In the comments, the author might tell us - albeit not clearly or in proper English, what they want to achieve, or why they're doing it this way.
antirez provides several examples where the code without the comments would be much harder to understand and/or maintain. Whenever this is the case, I would argue that comments are a must and without them the code is at least barely intelligible.
> Sorry, I can't find that page :-/
for several months
The HTTP version of your URL works fine. The HTTPS version has an expired cert. If I click past that, it redirects to redis.io, then gives a 404.
I know antirez is a smart guy, but if this is some kind of "I'm taking a bold stance against HTTPS" then I'd rather read the archive.org link with functioning HTTPS. My threat model prefers trusting archive.org to correctly reproduce the blog, over trusting everyone between me and antirez.com.
I certainly wouldn't trust Comcast to keep malicious ads out of their ad network, either.
[0] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140908/07191228453/comca...
If you run this command you can see a little more clearly what’s going on:
wget --no-check-certificate -S -O - https://antirez.com/news/124
If you try https://antirez.com/news/124 the web server at antirez.com:443 will answer this:
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: nginx/1.10.2
Date: Sat, 04 Sep 2021 18:15:46 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 185
Connection: keep-alive
Location: https://redis.io/news/124
However, many clients won’t heed this response, since antirez.com:443 serves a certificate that’s not valid for that hostname.