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Comment by Taylorious | Hacker News Reader

This looks awesome. The code is very clean and well laid out. I am disappointed that there are literally no comments in the source code though. Hopefully he will add comments, because a lot of what he is doing is not super obvious, at least not to me.

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I think everything up until main.c:909 is setup. The while look at 909 is an event loop of sorts. Between that and line 1024 is receiving the network code, IIRC. There is some GL code after that to render GL, it looks like.

A similar Minecraft "clone" in C++. The author writes blog articles about the development, very interesting read!

http://sea-of-memes.com/LetsCode4/LetsCode4.html

Minetest is a C++ based Minecraft-style simulation with a clean API for modding -- with a nice little ecosystem of mods.

(I am not affiliated with them. I just downloaded it a few months ago and have been tinkering with it.)

http://minetest.net/

Learn to read code instead of comments. It's super straight forward C.

What the code is doing is clear. The why (and especially the `why not') could benefit from some commentary.

I wish more programmers understood this concept. Yes, we can read the code for the what, which is why we don't need you to tell us you are adding 2 to X. Why is a different matter altogether, and that is where a comment can shine light on the scenario.

Thanks for elaborating on my thought. The `why not' is often as important (or even more important!) then the `why'.

By `why not' I mean, briefly explain what other alternative approaches there were, and why you chose the trade-offs you went for, instead of some other set.

To me it ruins the surprise, uncommented code is like an uncommented novel, once you've grok'd it the whole thing starts to make sense.

Comments are like coles notes.

It's good as professional courtesy but for personal projects... seems like a waste of time.

>it ruins the surprise

Huh? In the first place, I do NOT want any surprise at all.

Until you go back to it in a year's time and can't remember any of the reasons for your design decisions.

Besides, I genuinely find myself hilarious so the attempts at pithy commentary tend to make the whole "christ what was I thinking" part of looking at my old work less painful.

A novel is nothing but comments. The code was already executed in the author's brain.

Exactly that

Coders: don't give me any BS like x = x + 1 /* Increment x */

Rather, tell me, if it's not obvious, WHY are you doing that

To increment x

Why do you need to increment?

Because it needs to be bigger.

Then make it times 2. Or add 5.

There should rarely be any comments on why x is being incremented unless there is something particularly clever about why. Commentary should be reserved for program blocks where something non-obvious is happening or where something obvious is happening for non-obvious reasons, IMHO.

I read c or assembler code like I read a newspaper, but comments are needed even in my own code to understand the higher lever design.

I shouldn't have to do a linear scan of the code to find what I'm searching. Like a book has headlines, code should have comments to indicate what's what.

Are you a C programmer?

Maybe her or she should come to your house and explain the code to you one on one.

Install the code and play around with it to see what it does. This person was very generous to make this code public and you are disappointed that it didn't meet your standards.

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