[Haskell-cafe] What is the best way to understand large programs?

[Donald Bruce Stewart]

bulat.ziganshin:
> Hello Stefan,
> 
> Monday, January 29, 2007, 1:59:22 AM, you wrote:
> 
> > Note: I *have* managed to pretty thourougly understand lambdabot, but
> >       it took a while, wasn't particularly easy, and anyway
> >       lambdabot's dependency groups are quite small compared to eg
> >       lambdabot's.  I'm hoping to make things easier for myself.
> 
> imho, the problem is common for any language and it's just because
> most of programmers don't like to write comments. in my own program,
> comments/code ratio is about 1:1 and i, after 2 years of development,
> still understand it's every line :)  just compare yi and lambdadot
> with two best commented libs i've seen - base and MissingH

I had to go and check this!

                                        Code  Comments
Lambdabot:       TOTAL:                14263   5063
Yi:              TOTAL:                 3314   3270
Data.ByteString: TOTAL:                 3255   3135
Data.Binary:     TOTAL:                  782    849
hmp3:            TOTAL:                 2351   2236

base:            TOTAL:                43513  29009
MissingH:        TOTAL:                 6492   2017

Lambdabot wasn't commented at all until about 2 years ago! It's had a
strange history.

Not sure what this all means.

-- Don