Imbeciles in the Wild
by Jeremy on Jul.11, 2008, under Uncategorized
Most of your [code] comments are unnecessary.
Don't ever tell a developer that. Especially, one that is learning. Code commenting is one of biggest components of code maintainability and there are simply not enough developers that do it enough. The thought that someone really would instill the thought that comments are unnecessary really peeves me. I've had so many problems over the years that could've been solved if the programmer before me had just commented his stuff properly.
Don't be this idiot.
July 11th, 2008 on 4:36 pm
Heck, I’ve had so many problems over the years that could’ve been solved if _I_ had commented my stuff properly.
July 11th, 2008 on 7:22 pm
It could make sense if most of the developer’s comments were like “// set $x to 4″, which could happen if they’re in the middle of an intro CS course where they tell you to comment everything. I mainly just comment the purpose of classes/functions/properties, and any complex code blocks that might confuse others (or me) down the road.
July 27th, 2008 on 6:29 am
There’s a couple of interesting problems with code comments. The first is the additional overall bytes size of a file. In large projects this becomes expesive overhead. Granted, with modern systems this means a lot less than it used to. However, when you are releasing to a mixed audience of users and user systems it becomes something to take into account again.
Then again, there are wonderful things which have come about as a result of old needs to minimize the overall byte size. As an OO Developer I would expect to see some healthy UML out of you Jeremy. This would have mitigated a few headaches I had when supporting your work post your leaving the building. At that point in time, some clearer comments would have sufficed well too.
The problem I’ve seen many developers have in commenting their code boils down to a simple thing: the next poor bastage who has to work on it just may be less skilled than you. If you seek to leave a place better than you found it leave a clear instruction manual where you sat.
Of course, code that is still in place and common use as half of the staple product offering over a year after you were released for supposedly being short of the desired skill level is good approach too.