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Asked: 2026-05-10T23:17:25+00:00

After some stupid musings about Klingon languages, that came from this post I began

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After some stupid musings about Klingon languages, that came from this post I began a silly hobby project creating a Klingon programming language that compiles to Lua byte-code. During the initial language design phase I looked up information about Klingon programmers, and found out about this Klingon programming rule:

A TRUE Klingon Warrior does not comment his code!

So I decided my language would not support commenting, as any good Klingon would never use them.

Now many of the Klingon ways don’t seem reasonable to us Human programmers, however while dabbling with the design and implementation of my hobby language I came to realize that this Klingon rule about commenting is indeed very reasonable, if not great.

Removing the ability to comment from a programming language meant I HAVE to write literate code, no exceptions.

So it got me wondering if there are any languages out there that don’t support comments?

Is there are any really good arguments to not remove commenting from a language?

Edit: Any good examples of comments required?

P.S.> My hobby language above is partially silly anyways, so don’t focus too much on my implementation, as much as the concept of comments required in general

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  1. I am not sure I agree with the ‘Have’ in the statement ‘Removing the ability to comment from a programming language meant I HAVE to write literate code, no exceptions’, since it is not as if all code is documented. My guess is that most people would write unreadable code.

    More to the point, I personally do not believe in the reality of the self-explanatory program or API in the practical world.

    My experience from manually analyzing the documentation of entire APIs for my dissertation suggests that all too often you would have to carry more information than you could convey in the signature alone. If you eliminate interface comments from your language, what are the alternatives? No documentation is not an option. External documentation is less likely to be read.

    As for internal documentation, I can see your point in wanting to reduce documentation to convince people to write better. However, comments serve many collaboration and coordination purposes and are meant to raise awareness of things. By banishing these details to extenral locations, you are reducing the chances that they come to a future reader’s awareness, unless your tooling is great.

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