Ask HN: Is it normal to not have comments in a company's code? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is it normal to not have comments in a company's code?

2 pointsBonifasio7 comments

A month ago I started a SDE internship at a medium company, this is my first time working with code at a company. When I look at existing company code, nothing has any kind of comments, it makes it really hard to understand the code because of all the internal tools and acronyms that are not explained anywhere. And, in my PR reviews I am told to delete my comments to my code before I push it, even for the initial self project that they set me to do and which will only be used by me and my manager. Is it normal to not use comments in a company?

View on HN

    all the internal tools and acronyms that are not explained anywhere

YMMV, but comments are not usually the best place for this kind of background information as you have to FIND the source file they're in before you can read them. Many teams will keep an external "glossary" of common acronyms and tools in an external data store (wiki / Confluence / etc). If your company doesn't have one, consider _starting_ one as you already need to ask what all those things are anyways and can collect the answers.

Also consider if there's a better alternative to comments within your language's tooling - for instance, many languages now support generating human-readable documentation from metadata in source files (JavaDoc, ex_doc, YARD, etc)

My company explicitly, from day one on the job, forbids comments in code, under the belief that code should be clear enough to understand without comments or else you're doing it wrong.

Who's the fucking code virgin who has established this policy? Have they ever written code, or read code for that matter?

Do they claim they've written code before but it goes to another school?

"My code who lives in Canada" style? :D

I don't know who came up with the policy, but it's someone high up because it's company-wide. It's based on the Uncle Bob recommendations, ostensibly. Shrug

It's not normal.

Now, it would be good for you to understand if there's a rationale behind this (which would still be a major red flag), or if it's only a loose practice no one tried/succeeded to change.

It is extremely common.

It is here and I hate it. I’m championing an effort to fix that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com