Documentation is a burden

In a post about Agile programming at http://www.agilemodeling.com/essays/agileDocumentation.htm this quote of "Documentation is a burden" jumped out at me.

 

One of the great advantages of the old - but functional - COBOL language (*COmmon Business Oriented  Language) was that it pretty much self documented while writing and there was seldom a need to write verbal description - you just added a flowchart and you were done.

 

The modern programming languages are so "feature rich" with ability to inherit and REDEFINE that it becomes more of a burden in documenting them since they CAN redefine items people DO.

Spaghetti code? Nope - just 3 to 10 levels of inheritance that is actually WORSE since you are never sure if anything is ever just "plain vanilla" or been redefined and modified somewhere up the chain.

 

Me I LIKE "go to" statements - at least I know WHERE I am going !