10 months later bill revisits his spaghetti code. forgets absolutely everything and refuses to elaborate. this wouldn't have happened if Bill forgot to comment on his code(lemmy.world)

posted 10 months ago

u/unhappy_grapefruit_2@lemmy.world

programmer_humor@programming.dev

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Prunebutt@feddit.de

25 points

10 months ago

Comments are lies that will happen sometime in the future

Comments are always overlooked if gode gets refactored. Language servers can’t/won’t parse them and they’re easy to overlook.

If you name your functions/variables clearly, put complex logic into clearly named functions and keep the same level of abstraction in every function (which never exceeds roughly 50 lines), you hardly need any comments, if any.

Comments are for behavior that’s not possible to convey clearly through code.

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Archive@lemmy.world

7 points

10 months ago

If a block of code needs a comment, then you can easily move that block into a function and summarise the comment into a name for that function. If you can not easily move a block of code into a function, then you may need to rethink your design.

This isn’t always true of course, but it’s a good mindset to have.

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