I love finding little ideas that I can put away in a box and remember later to guide my way. This is why I like 37signals’ idea for establishing product vision.

Here’s one: write code so expressive it requires very few comments.  In Coding Without Comments, Jeff Atwood points out that seasoned programmers, in general, adhere closely to this statement.  Grasshoppers, meanwhile, are still picking up their chops.  They need comments to support their funky constructs.

This line of thinking reveals something deep about computer programming: a programming language is a real language.  Compare writing in a programming language to writing in, say, Spanish.  Could you imagine resorting to English in side notes, to explain what was going on in the body, simply because your Spanish was so bad that it would be difficult to understand otherwise?