Beyond code: Is there a difference between comments in visual and textual languages?

Abstract

Code comments are crucial for program comprehension and maintenance. To better understand the nature and content of comments, previous work proposed taxonomies of comment information for textual languages, notably classical programming languages. However, paradigms such as model-driven or model-based engineering often promote the use of visual languages, to which existing taxonomies are not directly applicable. Taking MATLAB/Simulink as a representative of a sophisticated and widely used modeling environment, we extend a multi-language comment taxonomy onto new (visual) comment types and two new languages: Simulink and MATLAB. Furthermore, we outline Simulink commenting practices and compare them to textual languages. We analyze 259,267 comments from 9,095 Simulink models and 17,792 MATLAB scripts. We identify the comment types, their usage frequency, classify comment information, and analyze their correlations with model metrics. We manually analyze 757 comments to extend the taxonomy. We also analyze commenting guidelines and developer adherence to them. Our extended taxonomy, SCoT (Simulink Comment Taxonomy), contains 25 categories. We find that Simulink comments, although often duplicated, are used at all model hierarchy levels. Of all comment types, Annotations are used most often; Notes scarcely. Our results indicate that Simulink developers, instead of extending comments, add new ones, and rarely follow commenting guidelines. Overall, we find Simulink comment information comparable to textual languages, which highlights commenting practice similarity across languages.