I recently hired into a data analytics team for a hospital, and we don’t have a style guide. Lots of frustration from folks working with legacy code…I thought putting together a style guide would help folks working with code they didn’t write, starting with requiring a header for SQL scripts first as low hanging fruit.
Or so I thought.
My counterpart over application development says that we shouldnt be documenting any metadata in-line, and he’d rather implement “docfx” if we want to improve code metadata and documentation. I’m terrified of half-implementing yet another application to further muddy the waters–i’m concerned it will become just one-more place to look while troubleshooting something.
Am I going crazy? I thought code headers were an industry standard, and in-line comments are regarded as practically necessary when working with a larger team…
Hmm, do I want to open some external site/program to see my documentation or have it already in the code in front of me?
We use doxygen at my company and I think I’ve only ever opened it twice in 9 years.
Doxygen may be required in regulated industries like healthcare, banking, or robotics, but programmers never use it internally. The headers themselves are useful though and show that programmers take care of what they write even if they don’t read the generated HTML.