What is your personal approach/take on commenting?
- by Trae
Duplicate
What are your hard rules about commenting?
A Developer I work with had some things to say about commenting that were interesting to me (see below). What is your personal approach/take on commenting?
"I don't add comments to code unless
its a simple heading or there's a
platform-bug or a necessary
work-around that isn't obvious. Code
can change and comments may become
misleading. Code should be
self-documenting in its use of
descriptive names and its logical
organization - and its solutions
should be the cleanest/simplest way
to perform a given task. If a
programmer can't tell what a program
does by only reading the code, then
he's not ready to alter it.
Commenting tends to be a crutch for
writing something complex or
non-obvious - my goal is to always
write clean and simple code."
"I think there a few camps when it
comes to commenting, the
enterprisey-type who think they're
writing an API and some grand
code-library that will be used for
generations to come, the
craftsman-like programmer that thinks
code says what it does clearer than a
comment could, and novices that write
verbose/unclear code so as to need to
leave notes to themselves as to why
they did something."
