ASCII diagram comments are surprisingly common in scientific computing, FWIW. It's not so much that it's always hairy code, more that it helps to add some visualizations of what's going on. Math vs intuitive understanding are often very different things.
It's something I wish was more common than it is. Sometimes you really want that ASCII pseudo graph explaining how minimizing this thing relates to that other thing that we actually care about.
Taken a step further, I really wish we had better systems for managing this type of information alongside a codebase. E.g. the whitepaper, or presentation, or figures, or whatever is often very necessary to understand the code, and ideally it would be under version control and live neatly alongside things. Nicely rendered docs definitely help with this (e.g. latex in comments), but I'm always surprised there aren't more people focusing on this aspect of information management.
It's something I wish was more common than it is. Sometimes you really want that ASCII pseudo graph explaining how minimizing this thing relates to that other thing that we actually care about.
Taken a step further, I really wish we had better systems for managing this type of information alongside a codebase. E.g. the whitepaper, or presentation, or figures, or whatever is often very necessary to understand the code, and ideally it would be under version control and live neatly alongside things. Nicely rendered docs definitely help with this (e.g. latex in comments), but I'm always surprised there aren't more people focusing on this aspect of information management.