Everything Old Is New Again

I enjoyed reading this “literate” version of the backbone.js source (I put “literate” in quotes because—oh, never mind, it doesn’t matter for the purposes of this post). But I was also kind of amused: as a young programmer, I was taught that two-column commenting, like this:

mov  @R1, R2                   # load hash table base
add  R2, R3
mov  @R2, R2                   # load hash table cell
lda  #WIDTH, R3
add  R2, R3

and then later told it was a Bad Thing, and that comments ought to go inline. Feels kind of hipster-retro to see two-column come back into style…