Well, I think it's a point worth discussing (maybe elsewhere? It's bound to get long). All I know is, intent-commenting has always yielded vast returns for me and my company.
It has reduced "onboarding time", especially for beginners.
It highlights logic errors, which are caught sooner.
It reduces code review time.
It reduces the time spent picking up one's own older code by at least half, usually more IME.
None of the above precludes clean coding principles (aside from comments). You never need a comment to see what the code is doing by itself or in direct context...only why it's there, in the grand, fully-abstracted picture.
It may come down to one's definition of "intent," but based on clear and measurable results, clearly Uncle Bob missed something.
And that's my main point. Robert Martin stated an absolute as if it were utterly impossible for him to be wrong in any case, and yet I can point to many cases where he literally was. The main issue is, Martin regularly confuses his opinion with objective fact.
That sort of absolutism is why I trust nothing coming directly from Martin; only once it has been vetted by programmers who combine experience with humility, will I consider it something of merit. (I learned many Clean Code principles this way, and I follow them.)
Well I do kinda find the absolutist style a little jarring myself. Yet I am largely skeptical about anything that I cannot related to person experience. I am also aware that I have some of the same tendencies to declare things as absolutes based on my own personal experiences.
In the case of comments, I believe that there is/was a school of thinking that comments are good, so more is better, and maximum is best, so folks would slap a giant comment in a big banner over every tiny method. I literally had a college supervisor who did that himself and taught it as best practice. Comments would say obvious stuff so you stopped reading them and often they were out of date, misleading or vague.
This means that when I first read the book it was a lightbulb. It was literally telling me something my college supervisor did wasn't a good idea. I had kinda figured it out but I still would have said comments were mandatory as that was what I was taught.
It depends on the language, the task, the team, and the context what is appropriate. If I am writing for my main day job I aim to write brutally simple and obvious code. I spent a significant amount of time to reread my code and mentally explain it to an imaginary third person with no experience. I picked this up from joining a large team where we would have to do a show-and-tell of code we wrote that was a new feature. It was done in the large team to share knowledge on a global call. We tended to practice presenting before hand as it was embarrassing when someone was trying to talk about their code and it was a trains smash. Often someone in the audience would ask about a specific block of code and the presenter who recently wrote it would stumble to explaining it. When rehearsing whenever I would stumble I would refactor my code to rename classes, methods and variables. The renaming was always to better express the intent of the code.
Time permitting I always rehearse presenting my code as I read through it even if I never present it. As I do this I refactor my code to be as obvious as possible. Sometimes due to time or just complexity of the situation I cannot make the code clearer. So I slap a comment on it. This always feels like is a small defeat.
So I now refactor my code to be as obvious as possible.
Well, and see, the commenting style I'm advocating (read the article I posted) doesn't conflict with this. It should always be obvious what your code is doing.
That's not what I mean by "intent". For example, the best clean code will show you that you're looping through all the entries in your "clients" dictionary and uppercasing the first letter of the name, but it may not be clear you are "correcting name capitalization issues"...or if said intent is obvious, it might not be so until you read and ponder 3-7 lines of code for a bit. That's wasted time.
(Pedantic Note: Yeeeeeees, the above example could be wrapped in a function called "fixNameCapIssues()"...I'm referring to sections of code that cannot be abstracted out. In practice, that's most.
Intent commenting is actually a living specification. You know that old rule about "don't code without a spec"? Put the spec in comment form, and code within.
I'm not the first to pioneer this. Donald Knuth created an earlier (and much clunkier) approach called Literate Programming.
If your comments simply describe what your code is doing, you should refactor so the code's function and purpose is obvious, but you should include a comment describing the language-agnostic intent of the logical section of code.
Make more sense?
(Read my article I posted earlier in thread about this for a more in-depth explanation, if that still doesn't make sense.)
Thanks for the link but that style of documenting isn’t something I would do in my context. I concede that If I joined your team I might discover that first over commenting and then removing the obvious comments might be optional in your context.
I am curious whether you do TDD. Writing tests to express intent and check the code meets it is something done in my context. That goes beyond self-documenting code. Code reviews expect a test suite as specification and that it is clean code with self documented intent.
...that style of documenting isn’t something I would do in my context.
And that's fine. I don't expect my take to work for everyone, everywhere, every time (unlike Robert Martin). I've yet to personally encounter someone who tried it and didn't benefit, but I've also yet to encounter a majority of programmers. ;)
I am curious whether you do TDD. Writing tests to express intent and check the code meets it is something done in my context.
Of course! Testing and CI is critical to our workflow. However, I've also found that testing, by nature, can replicate none of the benefits of intent-commenting.
In my experience, the best code is...
Clean (like I said, I do use many of Martin's principles),
Self-commenting,
Intent-commented (living inline specification),
Tested (good coverage),
Documented (not the same as commenting),
Reviewed.
In all my years of coding, I've never found any one of those items to be replaceable by any combination of the others.
Of course...
YMMV, and
If you're not working as part of a team, it may be hard to impossible to observe the negative impact(s) omitting one of the above might be causing. (e.g. you may not need to write a spec; you keep it all in your head...until you have another developer.)
Well, I think it's a point worth discussing (maybe elsewhere? It's bound to get long). All I know is, intent-commenting has always yielded vast returns for me and my company.
It has reduced "onboarding time", especially for beginners.
It highlights logic errors, which are caught sooner.
It reduces code review time.
It reduces the time spent picking up one's own older code by at least half, usually more IME.
None of the above precludes clean coding principles (aside from comments). You never need a comment to see what the code is doing by itself or in direct context...only why it's there, in the grand, fully-abstracted picture.
It may come down to one's definition of "intent," but based on clear and measurable results, clearly Uncle Bob missed something.
And that's my main point. Robert Martin stated an absolute as if it were utterly impossible for him to be wrong in any case, and yet I can point to many cases where he literally was. The main issue is, Martin regularly confuses his opinion with objective fact.
That sort of absolutism is why I trust nothing coming directly from Martin; only once it has been vetted by programmers who combine experience with humility, will I consider it something of merit. (I learned many Clean Code principles this way, and I follow them.)
Well I do kinda find the absolutist style a little jarring myself. Yet I am largely skeptical about anything that I cannot related to person experience. I am also aware that I have some of the same tendencies to declare things as absolutes based on my own personal experiences.
In the case of comments, I believe that there is/was a school of thinking that comments are good, so more is better, and maximum is best, so folks would slap a giant comment in a big banner over every tiny method. I literally had a college supervisor who did that himself and taught it as best practice. Comments would say obvious stuff so you stopped reading them and often they were out of date, misleading or vague.
This means that when I first read the book it was a lightbulb. It was literally telling me something my college supervisor did wasn't a good idea. I had kinda figured it out but I still would have said comments were mandatory as that was what I was taught.
It depends on the language, the task, the team, and the context what is appropriate. If I am writing for my main day job I aim to write brutally simple and obvious code. I spent a significant amount of time to reread my code and mentally explain it to an imaginary third person with no experience. I picked this up from joining a large team where we would have to do a show-and-tell of code we wrote that was a new feature. It was done in the large team to share knowledge on a global call. We tended to practice presenting before hand as it was embarrassing when someone was trying to talk about their code and it was a trains smash. Often someone in the audience would ask about a specific block of code and the presenter who recently wrote it would stumble to explaining it. When rehearsing whenever I would stumble I would refactor my code to rename classes, methods and variables. The renaming was always to better express the intent of the code.
Time permitting I always rehearse presenting my code as I read through it even if I never present it. As I do this I refactor my code to be as obvious as possible. Sometimes due to time or just complexity of the situation I cannot make the code clearer. So I slap a comment on it. This always feels like is a small defeat.
Well, and see, the commenting style I'm advocating (read the article I posted) doesn't conflict with this. It should always be obvious what your code is doing.
That's not what I mean by "intent". For example, the best clean code will show you that you're looping through all the entries in your "clients" dictionary and uppercasing the first letter of the name, but it may not be clear you are "correcting name capitalization issues"...or if said intent is obvious, it might not be so until you read and ponder 3-7 lines of code for a bit. That's wasted time.
(Pedantic Note: Yeeeeeees, the above example could be wrapped in a function called "fixNameCapIssues()"...I'm referring to sections of code that cannot be abstracted out. In practice, that's most.
Intent commenting is actually a living specification. You know that old rule about "don't code without a spec"? Put the spec in comment form, and code within.
I'm not the first to pioneer this. Donald Knuth created an earlier (and much clunkier) approach called Literate Programming.
If your comments simply describe what your code is doing, you should refactor so the code's function and purpose is obvious, but you should include a comment describing the language-agnostic intent of the logical section of code.
Make more sense?
(Read my article I posted earlier in thread about this for a more in-depth explanation, if that still doesn't make sense.)
Thanks for the link but that style of documenting isn’t something I would do in my context. I concede that If I joined your team I might discover that first over commenting and then removing the obvious comments might be optional in your context.
I am curious whether you do TDD. Writing tests to express intent and check the code meets it is something done in my context. That goes beyond self-documenting code. Code reviews expect a test suite as specification and that it is clean code with self documented intent.
And that's fine. I don't expect my take to work for everyone, everywhere, every time (unlike Robert Martin). I've yet to personally encounter someone who tried it and didn't benefit, but I've also yet to encounter a majority of programmers. ;)
Of course! Testing and CI is critical to our workflow. However, I've also found that testing, by nature, can replicate none of the benefits of intent-commenting.
In my experience, the best code is...
In all my years of coding, I've never found any one of those items to be replaceable by any combination of the others.
Of course...
YMMV, and
If you're not working as part of a team, it may be hard to impossible to observe the negative impact(s) omitting one of the above might be causing. (e.g. you may not need to write a spec; you keep it all in your head...until you have another developer.)
that's very well said. thanks.