Back on April 1, 2005, Cenqua unveiled The Commentator – a fantastic piece of software that relieves you of the burden of documenting your code by automatically generating comments in your source as you write it. The reaction we got was huge, but not in the way we expected.

The pitch was suitably hyperbolic:

Day in, day out, you pull off star moves: gnarly algorithms, wicked refactorings, stunning optimizations. Why should you stop and explain? Yes, you’ve got plodders on your team, but hey – YouAreAStar and YourTimeIsExpensive.

Chock full of “revolutionary realtime language parsing” technology, The Commentator could also be tuned so that generated comments matched your individual personality:

We wanted to give people a laugh – what we weren’t anticipating was to be taken seriously.

When The Commentator got picked up by Slashdot we were deluged by emails. Some thanked us for the laugh, but amazingly, a majority were requests to download the product. Serious requests. People wanting pricing. Reseller information. Enquires about volume discounts. Technical queries (“Does it support PHP?”, “Do you have a NetBeans plugin?”, and even “Is it compatible with Excel?” – WTF?!). We didn’t know whether to laugh or cry (or start cranking The Commentator into a real product, with clear market demand).

So why am I blogging this now? well, almost 18 months after its spectacular launch, The Commentator is still generating a trickle of enquiries. One arrived recently that was too good not to share. Before I do though, note on the dialog above that The Commentator offers a “Profanity” option, so that generated comments will be garnished with a flourish of expletives. The product webpage offers a mocked up example of that option in operation. Cue one concerned developer, who writes:

So there you are folks – a heads up: leave the profanity out of your software if you want “serious customers”.