This paper offers a look at the importance of good documentation and explanation when writing a program. Writing a language with the intention of creating both good-looking documentation and efficient code is something that can benefit a lot of people.

However, as the author said, this is not entirely meant for the educational realm. It strikes me that one needs to have extensive experience in both programming and document formatting to create WEB documents that are readable and useful. Hence the only thing to be gained from this in a pedagogical point of view is the fact that a program is much more undertandable when it is either well documented in-line or has a sufficient manual to describe what is happening at every line.

I think it is more beneficial to have an environment for students that will ease the process of and encourage good documentation of what they are writing. In addition, this environment should assist in creating well-designed programs, perhaps generating code stencil based on a design already entered by the programmer. I believe that there are tools that do this already, but I'm not aware of how welll they work.

Based on this I believe that our goal as educators should be to teach in a way that will encourage students to write well-documented, portable, extensible, and readable code in conjunction with a development tool, rather than providing a tool alone in the hopes that the results will be the same. Understanding the reasoning behind the buzzwords is one of the key parts in doing it, so if we can get that across to students, they should be able to do the rest.

MY COMMENTS

Do you think that people in industry would be willing to participate in a project like this when they are creating their code? Are they under the same time constraints?