If your code needs comments, it’s either because it’s unnecessarily complex/convoluted, or because there’s more thought in it (e.g. complex mathematic operations, or edge-cases etc.).
Comments just often don’t age well IME, and when people are “forced” to read the (hopefully readable) code, they will more likely understand what is really happening, and the relevant design decisions.
This mindset is good, but unfortunately enforces bad programmers to leave their undocumented code in critical places where someone eventually has to figure out what the hell they were doing or refactor the whole damn thing because they got promoted to middle-management and can’t remember why they even wrote it.
If you’re working with others, even simple code benefits from comments explaining what it’s intended to do. Sure you can read code and get a good idea of what it seems to do, but you can’t be sure that’s what it was meant to do, or why it was meant to do that. Having a quick statement from the author enables you to work faster. And if you find a mismatch between the comment and the code, it’s a smell that could mean a bug.
And for methods and functions it’s particularly helpful to have a description at the top. Many IDEs will pop this up when you’re using the method, so you can quickly confirm that it’s appropriate for your needs and get your arguments in the right order.
I even comment code for myself because it will save me time when I return to the project months later.
No comments would be fine if you could trust that everyone writes code that does what it’s intended to do and you can read code as quickly as you can read English. Maybe I’m a poor coder but I find neither of these is usually true.
Yeah, but unironic…
If your code needs comments, it’s either because it’s unnecessarily complex/convoluted, or because there’s more thought in it (e.g. complex mathematic operations, or edge-cases etc.). Comments just often don’t age well IME, and when people are “forced” to read the (hopefully readable) code, they will more likely understand what is really happening, and the relevant design decisions.
Good video I really recommend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bf7vDBBOBUA
Yeah, another way I’ve heard it phrased is comments are for explaining why you did things a certain way, not for explaining what it’s doing.
This mindset is good, but unfortunately enforces bad programmers to leave their undocumented code in critical places where someone eventually has to figure out what the hell they were doing or refactor the whole damn thing because they got promoted to middle-management and can’t remember why they even wrote it.
If you’re working with others, even simple code benefits from comments explaining what it’s intended to do. Sure you can read code and get a good idea of what it seems to do, but you can’t be sure that’s what it was meant to do, or why it was meant to do that. Having a quick statement from the author enables you to work faster. And if you find a mismatch between the comment and the code, it’s a smell that could mean a bug.
And for methods and functions it’s particularly helpful to have a description at the top. Many IDEs will pop this up when you’re using the method, so you can quickly confirm that it’s appropriate for your needs and get your arguments in the right order.
I even comment code for myself because it will save me time when I return to the project months later.
No comments would be fine if you could trust that everyone writes code that does what it’s intended to do and you can read code as quickly as you can read English. Maybe I’m a poor coder but I find neither of these is usually true.