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- cross-posted to:
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Bonus points for the cedilla
a good code doesn’t require comments.
Commenta should only exist to explain external requirement leading to a functionality being unexpected.
I’m also not a programmer, you’ll find my longest comments to explain why I’ve done some terrible mangling, what this does and how.
Spamming comments is rather controversial, especially in high-level languages. Problem is, they only show up in one place, so they’re just not very useful, but also have a high chance of becoming inaccurate over time. In particular when you spam them to explain relatively trivial stuff, people will stop reading them, meaning they won’t update them.
The ‘what’ can be documented with meaningful variable/function names, log/error/assert messages and perhaps most importantly unit/integration tests (which should be understood like a specification that checks automatically that it’s applied correctly).
Comments are indispensible for explaining the ‘why’, though, whenever that is not obvious.
Yeah, there’s a balance. If you comment every row of your code, you aren’t naming things clearly. If you never comment, the context is always incomplete.
You don’t comment what something does, ir can clearly be seen from the code itself. You comment why you do it.
Yes, that would be the context I’m talking about
“Clearly” is also subjective. What might be perfectly clear to me reading my own code may be really confusing to someone else, and vice versa. Especially if the person reading the code isn’t as familiar with the language as the person who wrote it, or if the code is using some syntactic sugar that isn’t super common, or plenty of other reasons.
True. It’s more like there’s no need to comment an if statement with “checks if a is larger than b”
Hello fellow basher.
In a more serious note, that’s why you document your software!
- encapsulation and meaningful function names.
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The people who say “the code is the documentation” totally misunderstood what that was supposed to look like
The code is so convoluted the programmer has no idea how it works. Just tables and arrays references each other.
You don’t remember, thats what comments are for!
Yep, having a shitty memory makes me write better code lol
Which is why making code readable is so very important. Our juniors and students will think we’re ridiculous, when we spend a long time cleaning up some code or choosing the least misunderstandable name for a type. But you fuck that up and then others, as well as your future self, will be wasting many more minutes misunderstanding what your code does.
I treat my future self a few months from now as a separate person who does not remember anything about why or what the specific code fragments do. And I’m grateful to my past self for doing the same.
Plus, you never know when you need to actually delegate supporting a particular piece of a solution to another person.
Write your code as if the next person that works with it is a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
Readable code is especially important when companies lay people off every six months so you constantly lose expertise
For anything that doesn’t seem entirely obvious I try to leave a comment. It could end up being helpful to me some time later, because let’s face it: your code is indistinguishable from someone else’s code 2 weeks after you commit it.
For anything
that doesn’t seem entirely obviousI try…I’ve come to teach myself that I have no idea what “entirely obvious” is.
This function is 3 lines long why am I boggled by it right now? I should have written a commentWell, over time, you accumulate some judgment about things like that. But you have some point too.
Yeah, it’s honestly mostly an issue of me dipping into programming and not properly sticking to it for long enough to wrap my mind around some concepts. I heard all the warnings that “learning to program is usually one of the hardest things someone has accomplished” because of how late we learn it and all the other complications. I also, however, have heard my whole life that I learned fast and picked things up easily. Boy oh boy was one of those messages more useful than the other lol
Comment your code. Problem solved.
Make sure to remember to update your comments too, otherwise it causes even more confusion when something works differently than it says it does.
That happened to me multiple times…
And decent variable names if you can, as well.
No magic numbers!
WYM, I can’t just name my functions
foo()and my variables single letters? /s$retValand$itemare my personal favourite.
This made me chortle. I remember when I first joined a dev team asking someone how many of something their section should be able to store:
I don’t know, I’d have to look at the code.
It was an eye opening moment. Very few people can keep everything in their head. I’ve met a couple. They were rockstars who were truly exceptional.
For me it all depends on how often a project changes. If it’s constantly in flux, I don’t bother remembering any of it because I might not be the last one who touched it. The more you try to remember everything, the more wrong you become due to the successive work of your coworkers.
You dont. Thats why you write comments!
Code never lies; comments sometimes do.
You dont. Thats why you write code that explains itself. For higher level info you write documentation.
Yes. And also comments :-)
The only moment you write comments is when you are doing something extremely weird for a specific reason that will not be immediately obvious and you want to warn the person doing a refactor in the future. In any other case, writing self documenting code is the way. If you are unable to do that, then your code needs to be rewrtitten.
Mmmm kind of? I wouldn’t categorize most comments as describing “extremely weird” reasons, though. Code will generally explain the “how”, while comments can describe the “why”. For example, think of an enum with ViewSize “mini” and “full”. It might be nice to have a comment to briefly summarize what ViewSize is meant to represent, and maybe link to a spec. Basically, a comment here will connect the intention with the implementation.
A more inline-comment example of this might be if there’s a slightly nuanced case that you want to be very clear about, ala maybe a Javascript true/false/null case, where you might be checking === false, and specifically don’t want someone to refactor it into a falsy check. Kind of contrived example , but that sort of thing. This is probably more the “extremely weird” comment you’re talking about; almost just a warning that this might not be what you think it is.
The other common use-case I find good for comments is for summarizing the goals/purpose of a complex function. This is mostly for future people who might utilize this function, and don’t want to read through a bunch of code, just to remember the nuances of what it’s supposed to do. For example, a “sortEvents” function, you may want to summarize the business requirements of the sort at the top. Although, this kind of thing may be different depending on how documentation is stored.
Self documenting code is a myth as what’s self documenting to one person is not to the next. Code comments and process/workflow documentation is needed for a healthy codebase.
I thought the same, until I spent a few years on a codebase where self-documenting code was enforced with detailed code reviews. That does a very good job of clearing up the ambiguity.
If you can’t get that kind of review, then by all means use comments.
Lmao. Sure buddy.
Try handing over your “self documenting code” to a junior dev who doesn’t know the language it’s written in and see how far they get with it.
Now hand that exact same codebase with comments to the same junior dev, and I guarantee you they’ll get further than without the comments.
I have given well documented code to plenty of juniors, it comes with being a senior dev / techlead. And it was perfectly understood. Maybe you simply don’t write self documenting code.
♫tale as old as time♫ ♫opinions that are mine♫
Not really an opinion when most companies run on self documenting code since time immemorial.
It’s thing! Omni-man says ‘thing’, not ‘part’. I’ve seen this meme format for a few years now and I’ve only just realised it’s a misquote after watching the show. Completely irrelevant nitpick I know but some people might appreciate it.
Partially yes. But if I create something myself I can “revisit” the headspace of that portion very easily, like I walked into a room.
Doesn’t work as well on codebases I don’t own fully though.
Yeah, which is why pairing works so well. Suddenly, you’ve got two people who were there when it was created and might know why certain design decisions were made.
Which means twice the savings when you unexpectedly lay them both off!
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This one always spoke to me. But I work on embedded systems so I get to fiddle with physical equipment to really make sure the code works.
