this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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[–] NotAnonymousAtAll@feddit.de 26 points 2 years ago (14 children)

About comments:

Please please please, do not always write comments. Try to write code that does not need comments whenever possible. Proper variable, class and method names go a long way. If you think a block of code needs a comment, turn it into a method and give it a proper name instead.

Comments should be a last resort for cases where making the code self explanatory is not possible, and those should be rare.

About optimization:

Optimal code is code that fulfills it's purpose without observable issues.

If you try to make something faster without any prior complaints or measurements indicating that it being slow is an actual issue, you are not optimizing, you are just engaging in mental masturbation.

[–] squaresinger@feddit.de 15 points 2 years ago (7 children)

I strongly disagree with the comments. "The code is the documentation" was a dumb joke about being to lazy to write documentation, not a best practices guideline.

Proper naming is good, but there are a lot of issues with not commenting code. Obviously it's dumb to comment every line, but it's really useful to comment functions/methods, because otherwise you never know if something's a bug or a non-obvious feature. Comments act as a parity check to the code, since they tell you what the dev who wrote the code wanted the code to do.

Also, everone thinks they write good, clean and obvious code. Hardly anyone purpously writes bad, hacky code. Yet if you look at code you wrote a year ago, or code someone else on your team wrote, it's full of non-obvious hacks. That means, people constantly misjudge the obviousnes of their code. Comments should be put on anything that could maybe be non-obvious.

And putting documentation of the code anywhere else than in a comment (e.g. Confluence) is a total waste of time (unless you put a link to the specific page of the documentation in a comment in the code), because documentation that you don't directly see without effort will not be found and not be read.

[–] Sotuanduso@lemm.ee 9 points 2 years ago

Also, everone thinks they write good, clean and obvious code. Hardly anyone purpously writes bad, hacky code.

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