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Previous studies have characterized code comments in various programminglanguages to support better program comprehension activities and maintenancetasks. However, very few studies have focused on understanding developerpractices to write comments. None of them has compared such developer practicesto the standard comment guidelines to study the extent to which developersfollow the guidelines. This paper reports the first empirical studyinvestigating commenting practices in Pharo Smalltalk. First, we analyze classcomment evolution over seven Pharo versions. Then, we investigate theinformation types embedded in class comments. Finally, we study the adherenceof developer commenting practices to the official class comment template overPharo versions.  The results of this study show that there is a rapid increase in classcomments in the initial three Pharo versions, while in subsequent versionsdevelopers added comments to both new and old classes, thus maintaining asimilar code to comment ratio. We furthermore found three times as manyinformation types in class comments as those suggested by the template.However, the information types suggested by the template tend to be presentmore often than other types of information. Additionally, we find that asubstantial proportion of comments follow the writing style of the template inwriting these information types, but they are written and formatted in anon-uniform way.This suggests the need to standardize the commenting guidelinesfor formatting the text, and to provide headers for the different informationtypes to ensure a consistent style and to identify the information easily.Given the importance of high-quality code comments, we draw numerousimplications for developers and researchers to improve the support for commentquality assessment tools.

What do class comments tell us? An investigation of comment evolution and practices in Pharo Smalltalk