• SpeakinTelnet@programming.dev
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    11 months ago

    I don’t care how much you think your code is readable, plain text comments are readable by everyone no matter the proficiency in the programming language used. That alone can make a huge difference when you’re just trying to understand how someone handled a situation.

    • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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      11 months ago

      Comments explain why, not what. Any comments that explain what a section of code is doing would probably be better off as separated methods.

      Apart from basic documentation comments, like JavaDoc or C#'s XML documentation comments.

      • SpeakinTelnet@programming.dev
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        11 months ago

        There’s nothing limiting what a comment should be as far as I know.

        As an example of what I mean, I’ve seen in a 10k+ lines python code a few lines of bit manipulation. There was a comment explaining what those lines did and why. They didn’t expect everyone to be proficient in bit manipulation but it made it so that anyone could understand anyway.

        • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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          11 months ago

          There’s nothing limiting what a comment should be as far as I know.

          Nothing technical, sure. Just good coding practices.

    • Fal@yiffit.net
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      11 months ago

      There’s nothing keeping the comments up to date with the code. Comments should be sparse and only on sections that aren’t obvious why they’re being done