[JSR308] Can we agree on our goals?

[Eugene Kuleshov]

Ted Neward wrote:

> > Ted, do agree with you that it is better practice to write less
> > comments. Unfortunately it is still less then common practice and
> > unfortunately we can't say that "agilist" fraction represent big
> > part of "many developers".
>  Well, certainly my anecdotal experience from conference attendees and
>  class participants would suggest that this percentage is larger than
>  you're making it seem. Agile is having a pretty large impact on the
>  developer community as a whole, and even if a team doesn't pronounce
>  themselves as "agile", they're adopting a lot of agile practices.

  I am not arguing that agile is gaining popularity and its adoption is 
increasing. It just there are developers who don't want to learn new 
stuff and those don't go to the conferences and don't take courses. This 
is of course speculation, so as measuring state of the average Joe 
developer based on impression on the conference attendees. :-)

> > Anyways, as you pointed out, there is a movement to write less
> > comments because they are getting out of sync. That would also help
> >  tools like JML, that are heavily comment based, only because they
> > have no other choice at the moment. So, tools like that would
> > benefit from the structurized information semantically linked to
> > the code.
>  But we're losing sight of the main point, which was, once again, code
>  clarity and readability. We do not want to enable annotations on
>  various language constructs simply because we "can", but because the
>  gain in power and expression will offset the added linguistic
>  complexity.

  I completely agree with that and been trying to provide with examples 
that would of benefit from such additions to the language.

  regards,
  Eugene