this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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me when first starting out at a job commenting everything I can
VS
me a couple years in completely lost because I never updated the comments and now none of them make any sense whatsoever
Commenting well is a highly advanced skill. I generally prefer no comments on code since it's less likely to confuse people and I'll merrily purge auto-doc comments and anything like
That comment has negative value.
I can't help it, I always get the mental image of hands clapping sarcastically when I see something like that.
In my experience refactoring lots and lots of crappy code left by devs long gone, a dev who can write useful comments is by and large a dev who can write code clean and simple enough not to need them. If the code doesn't have informative names and clear separation of concern, chances are a comment won't help because the dev didn't really know what they did that worked in the first place.
Generally, yes. However I have been known to document exactly why I'm doing something incredibly stupid - because it's required but a stupid third party library which, despite being awful, is still better than implementing it myself as a refactor.
my boss is great in this regard and also always has to keep reminding us to write unit tests 😅
Comments should only be used to describe stuff that’s otherwise difficult to convey with code.
The best explanation I've ever heard is:
There are some cases though where the code is just complicated for reasons outside of your control, in which case "what" comments are good - but they should never be taken at face value, but only used as a first step in understanding the code. There's a significant risk of the code not actually doing what the comment says.
Yeah. Most of the time I use comments in my algorithms, as they often use some weird optimized black magic which are difficult to understand without comments.
Like don't set this value to the obvious default. Bad stuff happens
I write a lot of fairly simple scripts in Bash and PowerShell that should be easily understood by anybody else with moderate experience in the language, but I leave a lot of obvious comments because my coworkers don't write any code and are extremely skittish about my automations. I add them basically to quell their fears.
Why are coworkers who don't write any code in the codebase?
These are scripts that manage stuff on a few hundred user endpoints and a few servers. They were doing basically everything manually until I got here, and the only way I could get them on board with my slow introduction of automation is to let them see it. I have to ensure things don't get too long, complex, or hard to explain, or they start getting nervous.
I'd rather teach people to comment well through my reviews. Much easier to understand two lines of well written function description in English than 20 lines of code.
Yeah well now we have git copilot where your comments include AI suggestions.
Now I have TONS more comments