self-documenting code

The belief that with meaningful variable name choices and uncompromising
adherence to a coding style the need for comments written in natural
language (typically English) can be reduced towards zero. This belief
is in almost all cases false. Hackers are often under the impression
that what their code does is somehow immediately "obvious" to the
reader, but this is only the case if others think about the algorithmic
structure of problems in an identical manner, which in practice almost
never happens. Also see literate programming.
