I recently hired into a data analytics team for a hospital, and we don’t have a style guide. Lots of frustration from folks working with legacy code…I thought putting together a style guide would help folks working with code they didn’t write, starting with requiring a header for SQL scripts first as low hanging fruit.
Or so I thought.
My counterpart over application development says that we shouldnt be documenting any metadata in-line, and he’d rather implement “docfx” if we want to improve code metadata and documentation. I’m terrified of half-implementing yet another application to further muddy the waters–i’m concerned it will become just one-more place to look while troubleshooting something.
Am I going crazy? I thought code headers were an industry standard, and in-line comments are regarded as practically necessary when working with a larger team…
I recently hired into a data analytics team
I work in Data Engineering and have spent most my time on analytics teams. They don’t have a SWE/CS background and generally because of that don’t follow any good programming practices. In my experience style guides are hard to get them to follow properly even if you set up SQLFluff for them., I can barely make them see the advantage of not committing directly to main (at least we’re using git). It’s very frustrating.
I think it depends on what you want to put in the header. An overall description of the file, it’s goal, etc - that sounds great.
A changelog saying who changed what, when? Our version control system is tracking that for us already.
Hmm, do I want to open some external site/program to see my documentation or have it already in the code in front of me?
We use doxygen at my company and I think I’ve only ever opened it twice in 9 years.
Yes, serious people write docs. I hate this bullshit about code that should be so good that it’s “auto-documenting.” It never happens in real life. Code is at best of average quality, but it needs documentation. At my previous job they had “guidelines” to make sure that code didn’t needed doc. It was a bad joke and we had the worst code I’ve ever seen.
I don’t have solutions for you though. You need a combo of documentation generation, code formatter (in the CI maybe, or before a commit), and code linters to check for errors.
Writing self documenting code reduces the need for comments significantly, but you’ll still need to write docs and even code comments when needed.
I had a lead architect at one of my previous workplaces who outright forbid writing comments, otherwise the build would fail. That lead to convoluted and slow solutions in order to make the code readable, or just parts that nobody wanted to touch because nobody understood them.
My point is that you should strive towards self documenting code as much as it makes sense, but don’t take it to mean that you should never write comments.
People should be able to tell what your code does without going deep into implementation details but that’s not always possible, especially if you’re working with lower level languages with fewer abstractions, or projects with complex algorithms or architecture.
Its wild to me that some people hear “your code should be self documenting” and take that to mean “never write comments”.
All self documenting should mean is I can look at a method and get a general understanding of what it does, and it shouldn’t have any unknown functionality. Specific implementations, design quirks, choices that might only make sense if you know business context should all be comments in your code.
On the other side of all that I worked with someone who insisted methods were documented college style, the “authors” name, date it was written, what it does, why it’s here, our star sign. I hate that just as much, so much clutter.
Its wild to me that some people hear “your code should be self documenting” and take that to mean “never write comments”.
It’s the same people that hear “security by obscurity is not security” and take it to mean “publicity is more secure than obscurity”. A key being under a door mat is bad but putting it on top of the mat because “obscurity isn’t security” is silly.
Edit: A better example is having a hidden door with a look is still more secure than having a non-hidden door with a lock.
I like it better when the docs are embedded in the code or alongside them. Everywhere I’ve worked it is a pain trying to find some random Confluence page or whatever where some API doc is.
Commenting your code is an industry standard. Some kind of separate comment metadata won’t generally work, unless you code exclusively in spreadsheets, where you can add a note to each cell.
Given that it’s a hospital, I guess your management will listen to whomever performs bureaucracy better, not whomever codes better.
