Heh. For some reason this reminds me of the "shower scene" from the very first episode of Dilbert (the animated series), where Dogbert is attempting to hack Dilbert's voice-activated shower temperature control.
I have on my shelf my senior year backup tape, which contains all the files from college that I'd accumulated. I graduated in 1978. Fortunately I've not had any reason to attempt to restore any of this lovely SNOBOL or FORTRAN IV code.
I've been laid off five times in my career; never got free beer for my troubles.
I mostly agree -- comments are not proof that the coder understood the problem (although it may be evidence he or she did NOT); instead, comments are an effort by the coder to lift up the next coder who has to maintain, fix, extend or test the code. I think of comments as time-saving work: you are doing a few minutes (or hours) work now, to save Future You (who may wear a different face) from spending hours (or days) and costing your company a lot of money.
However, when you are faced with a block of code you don't understand (whether you wrote it or not), and a block of comments, it's going to be hard to trust that block of comments if it's filled with grammatical or spelling errors.
In other news, Rush Limbaugh is in town for a 2012 strategy session with Sarah Palin.
Today is the first day of the rest of your lossage.
