Why should you document code?

Posted by Edwin Tripp on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Edwin Tripp
Published on 2011-11-25T22:27:09Z Indexed on 2011/11/26 2:06 UTC
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I am a graduate software developer for a financial company that uses an old COBOL-like language/flat-file record storage system. The code is completely undocumented, both code comments and overall system design and there is no help on the web (unused outside the industry). The current developers have been working on the system for between 10 and 30 years and are adamant that documentation is unnecessary as you can just read the code to work out what's going on and that you can't trust comments.

Why should such a system be documented?

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