I build things with my hands. The human behind Shift - https://laravelshift.com, master of Git - https://gettinggit.com, and author of "BaseCode" - https://basecodefieldguide.com
Developers often equate clean code to self documenting code to no comments. It's neither a zero-sum game, nor are all these things necessary conditions of one another.
As the author of many clean code articles as well as removing comments I think this is an important distinction. Otherwise these topics can become similar to the tabs vs spaces holy war.
I am obviously on the other side of the spectrum. I challenge myself to rework the code so what comments are no longer required. That doesn't mean my code doesn't have comments. There may be an occasional why comment. I just use them sparingly to keep the code my primary medium of communication.
And that, in my mind, is absolutely great. My problem is the case where people decide that they've reworked the code so that what style comments are unnecessary, and so they remove all comments - including the why style ones.
I stand by this too. How often did we see old comments that lead you off the understanding of the code because it wasn't updated? To me if you have to write a comment saying what it does it's a code smell that needs refactoring. Too much comments is a noise that we all end up ignoring and then collects dust. I only write down a comment saying why some code is written in some way to explain it's unusual design and that it was (hopefully) the best idea at the moment. Only 2 rules of exception here for noisy comments : you write assembly or the comments are used by testing tools for test cases. Rare comments catch the eye.
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Developers often equate clean code to self documenting code to no comments. It's neither a zero-sum game, nor are all these things necessary conditions of one another.
As the author of many clean code articles as well as removing comments I think this is an important distinction. Otherwise these topics can become similar to the tabs vs spaces holy war.
I am obviously on the other side of the spectrum. I challenge myself to rework the code so what comments are no longer required. That doesn't mean my code doesn't have comments. There may be an occasional why comment. I just use them sparingly to keep the code my primary medium of communication.
And that, in my mind, is absolutely great. My problem is the case where people decide that they've reworked the code so that what style comments are unnecessary, and so they remove all comments - including the why style ones.
I stand by this too. How often did we see old comments that lead you off the understanding of the code because it wasn't updated? To me if you have to write a comment saying what it does it's a code smell that needs refactoring. Too much comments is a noise that we all end up ignoring and then collects dust. I only write down a comment saying why some code is written in some way to explain it's unusual design and that it was (hopefully) the best idea at the moment. Only 2 rules of exception here for noisy comments : you write assembly or the comments are used by testing tools for test cases. Rare comments catch the eye.