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Comment by nonamenoslogan | Hacker News Reader

I've spent the last three years translating COBOL programs off of an HP3000 in to to SQL-backended web-apps and can say as a non-Programmer who was given a pile of COBOL source to decompile, I like its simplicity and ease of readability. Most of the code is from the 80's or 90's but is well commented and easy to work with and understand. Speaking of, most of this code still works or was in use until 2-3 years ago--on the HP3000. Its a testament to how long this stuff can be kept useful. Also, the COBOL team here wasn't astoundingly well paid, but good stable and low-stress jobs in the middle-range of local income is something that is becoming harder and harder to find.

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The importance of the comments in COBOL reminds me of a developer I worked with who was famous for removing comments to 'tidy up the code'

The other developers then spent time readding the comments

I hope you removed that dev to tidy up the team.

I did see codebases with tons of comments saying the wrong thing. Comments (prose) are not compiled and executed and tested and can easily drift

There is such a thing as unnecessary comments and I only add comments myself when factors outside of the immediately visible code are effecting the logical flow... but removing other people's comments (other then auto-doc style ones) is a really bad habit.

You're essentially invalidating the opinion of whoever thought it was important to put a comment there in the first place and, unless it's done after a team discussion on the types of comments to include in code, it's being done unilaterally.

Comments in code are like sex. When they are good its incredible, when they are bad it’s better than nothing

The difference to sex is that comments are unnecessary if the project is in good shape otherwise. Yes, no code is really self-documenting, but requirements documents, handbooks, documentation comments, VCS logs and tests should make it possible to elucidate weird code parts.

Bad comments are detrimental: some are outdated comments that were forgotten to remove or to update, and others were wrong or misleading to begin with. Some are just redundant (they might state the obvious) and might become misleading later on. Their existence is of historical interest in the best case.

When comments are bad they can be actively misleading and when comments are everywhere they can do nothing but obscure logic. I like well commented code, but poorly commented code can be worse than uncommented code that's clearly written. Lastly, adding comments to code doesn't always add value.

Sex is like a game of Bridge. If you don't have a good partner, then you'd better have a strong hand.

> was famous for removing comments to 'tidy up the code'. The other developers then spent time readding the comments

"good stable and low-stress jobs in the middle-range of local income"

Yep. In high-stress jobs you sometimes meet an asshole who removes the comments, but no one has time to re-add them.

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