Commenting on comments
This statement is on my Ohloh page for ClamTk:
"Across all Perl projects on Ohloh, 28% of all source code lines are comments. For ClamTk, this figure is only 14%.
This lack of comments puts ClamTk among the lowest one-third of all Perl projects on Ohloh."
Now when I first saw that, the figure was probably 8%. Ohloh has since shamed me into obsessively adding more. I'm somewhat embarrased about the low number of comments - especially after developing this for 6+ years - but the 28% figure stuns me. In a good way, of course. As an amateur, it's probably just my lack of experience and limited exposure to other code bases.
I'm an amateur Perl geek and the author of ClamTk, a GUI written in gtk2-perl.
28% is too much. That's nearly a third of your code which is not actually code. If you need that many comments, maybe your code isn't as clear as it could be.
Thanks for clarifying. I'm not going to stress about my 14% then. :)
Does the 28% figure also include the POD? That would both make sense and make it quite meaningless IMHO.
I agree, ohloh's metrics harks of pointy-hair managers who count lines of code, or number of check-ins but not what is actually written in them. I don't want to know how many lines of comment a project written in a less verbose language like Java or C# would require (less verbose syntax == more verbose code) to satisfy such a ratio.
Like other people here, I'm also not a fan of excessive commenting. Like Martin Fowler says in the book Refactoring, often the need of a comment is indicative that the code is not clear or factored enough. So I think that Ohloh measurement is silly and should be ignored, because it's not indicative of the real world worth of your code.