Najeeb Shaikh

Programming and writing rarely mix. Or at least they don’t mix well enough. While I have always had my suspicions about this, they were invariably and with almost unerring frequency confirmed during the years (decades actually) that I spent working with some of the best programmers in the industry; Programmers who could write software code like nobody’s business, but were severely handicapped when it came to documenting it. Even simple comments explaining classes and methods would not be up to the mark, to put it mildly. Ergo, the one thing I always advise software companies to *not* do is depend on software programmers for documenting their code. Because we need to bear in mind that writing code and writing prose explaining that code often require orthogonal skills.