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Comment by mnsc | Hacker News Reader

So even if comments are flawlessly updated they are not a silver bullet. Not everyone are good at explaining confusing concepts in plain English so worst case you have confusing code and a comment that is 90% accurate but describe one detail in a way that doesn't really match what the code says. This will make you question if you have understood what the code does and it will take time and effort to convince yourself that code is in fact deterministic and unsurprising.

(but most often the comment is is just not updated or updated along with the code but without full understanding, which is what caused the bug that is the reason you are looking at the code in question)

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> So even if comments are flawlessly updated they are not a silver bullet.

This "has to be perfect in perpetuity or it is of no value" mentality I don't find helpful.

Be kind to FutureDev. Comment the weird "why"s. If you need to change it later, adjust the comment.

Yeah: "what if this code becomes tech debt later" applies to everything, not just comments. It's a tradeoff.

The best thing you can do to avoid creating debt for later maintainers is to write code that's easy to delete, and adding comments helps with that.

I don't think comments need to be perfect to have value. My point was that if a certain piece of code is solving a particularly confusing problem in the domain, explaining it in a comment doesn't _necessarily_ mean the code will be less confusing to future dev if the current developer is not able to capture the issue in plain English. Future dev would be happier I think with putting more effort into refactoring and making the code more readable and clear. When that fails, a "here be dragons" comment is valuable.

They can write a very long comment explaining why it is confusing them in X, Y, Z vague ways. Or even multilingual comments if they have better writing skills in another lanaguage.

And even if they don’t know themselves why they are confused, they can still describe how they are confused.

And any attempt whatsoever is some improvement over doing nothing and wishing luck to the next guy.

And that time spent writing a small paper in one's native language would be better spent trying to make the code speak for itself. Maybe get some help, pair up and tackle the complexity. And when both/all involved is like, we can't make this any clearer and it's still confusing af. _Then_ it's time to write that lengthy comment for future poor maintainers.

You can only do the “what” with clearer code. The “why” needs some documentation. Even if it is obvious what the strange conditionals do, someone needs to have written down that this particular code is there because the special exemption from important tariffs of cigarettes due to the trade agreement between Serbia and Tunis that was valid between the years years 1992 and 2007.

This is where a good comment really can help! And in these types of domains I would guess/hope that there exists some project master list to crossref that will send both developers and domain experts to the same source for "tariff-EU-92-0578" specifically the section 'exemptions'. So the comment is not not just a whole paragraph copied in between a couple of /*/

Thing is, good documentation has to be part of the company's process. eg, a QA engineer would have to be responsible for checking the documentation and certifying it. Costs money and time.

You can't expect developers, already working 60 hour weeks to meet impossible deadlines, to spend another 15 hours altruistically documenting their code.

Or you know, work the devs 40 hour weeks and make sure documentation is valued. Everything costs one way or another, it's all trade-off turtles all the way down.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

"We don't write any documentation because we can't afford a dedicated QA process to certify it" <- that's dumb.

Every line of documentation is a line of code and is a liability as it will rot if not maintained. That’s why you should be writing self documenting code as much as possible that’s obviates the need for documentation. But unlike code, stale/wrong doc will not break tests.

Spending 15 hours documenting the code is something no leader should be asking of engineering to do. You should not need to do it. Go back and write better code, one That’s more clear at a glance, easily readable, uses small functions written at a comparable level of abstraction, uses clear, semantically meaningful names.

Before you write a line of documentation, you should ask yourself whether the weird thing you were about to document can be expressed directly in the name of the method of the variable instead. Only once you have exhausted all the options for expressing the concept in code, then, only then, are you allowed to add the line of the documentation regarding it.

> Only once you have exhausted all the options for expressing the concept in code, then, only then, are you allowed to add the line of the documentation regarding it.

But that's what people are talking about when talking about comments. The assumption is that the code is organized and named well already.

The real world of complexity is way beyond the expressiveness of code, unless you want function names like:

prorateTheCurrentDaysPartialFactoryReceiptsToYesterdaysStateOfSalesOrderAllocationsInTheSamePrioritySequenceThatDrivesFinancialReportingOfOwnedInventoryByBusinessUnit()

The code that performs this function is relatively simple, but the multiple concepts involved in the WHY and HOW are much less obvious.

Any documentation at all > no documentation, 99 times out of 100. And requiring your people to work 60 hours/week is symptomatic of larger problems.

How about old, out of date documentation that is actively misleading? Because that’s mostly what I run into, and it’s decidedly worse that no documentation.

Give me readable code over crappy documentation any day. In an ideal world the docs would be correct all of the time, apparently I don’t live in that world, and I’ve grown tired of listening to those who claim we just need to try harder.

An outdated comment is still a datapoint! Including if the comment was wrong when it was first written!

We live in a world with version history, repositories with change requests, communications… code comments are a part of that ecosystem.

A comment that is outright incorrect at inception is still valuable even if it is at least an attempt by the writer to describe their internal understanding of things.

This. I have argued with plenty of developers on why comments are useful, and the counter arguments are always the same.

I believe it boils down to a lack of foresight. At some point in time, someone is going to revisit your code, and even just a small `// Sorry this is awful, we have to X but this was difficult because of Y` will go a long way.

While I (try to) have very fluid opinions in all aspects of programming, the usefulness of comments is not something I (think!) I'll ever budge on. :)

> // Sorry this is awful, we have to X but this was difficult because of Y

You don’t know how many times I’ve seen this with a cute little GitLens inline message of “Brian Smith, 10 years ago”. If Brian couldn’t figure it out 10 years ago, I’m not likely going to attempt it either, especially if it has been working for 10 years.

But knowing what Brian was considering at the time is useful, both due avoiding redoing that and for realising that some constraints may have been lifted.

We should call them code clues

It just occurred to me that perhaps this is where AI might prove useful. Functions could have some kind of annotation that triggers AI to analyze the function and explain it plain language when you do something like hover over the function name in the IDE, or, you can have a prompt where you can interact with that piece of code and ask it questions. Obviously this would mean developer-written comments would be less likely to make it into the commit history, but it might be better than nothing, especially in older codebases where the original developer(s) are long gone. Maybe this already exists, but I’m too lazy to research that right now.

But then could you trust it not to hallucinate functionality that doesn't exist? Seems as risky as out-of-date comments, if not more

What I'd really like is an AI linter than noticed if you've changed some functionality referenced in a comment without updating that comment. Then, the worst-case scenario is that it doesn't notice, and we're back where we started.

What if you don't know that the comment is wrong?

IMO the only thing you can assume is that the person who wrote the comment wasn't actively trying to deceive you. You should treat all documentation, comments, function names, commit messages etc with a healthy dose of scepticism because no one truly has a strong grip on reality.

Right, unlike code (which does what it does, even if that isn't what the writer meant) there's no real feedback loop for comments. Still worth internalizing the info based on that IMO.

"This does X" as a comment when it in fact does Y in condition Z means that the probability you are looking at a bug goes up a bit! Without the comment you might not be able to identify that Y is not intentional.

Maybe Y is intentional! In which case the comment that "this is intentional" is helpful. Perhaps the intentionality is also incorrect, and that's yet another data point!

Fairly rare for there to be negative value in comments.

Comments that explain the intent, rather than implementation, are the more useful kind. And when intent doesn't match the actual code, that's a good hint - it might be why the code doesn't work.

If a developer can’t write intelligible comments or straightforward code, then I’d argue they should find another job.

I mean it's easy to say silly things like this, but in reality most developers suck in one way or another.

In addition companies don't seem to give a shit about straightforward code, they want LOC per day and the cheapest price possible which leads to tons of crap code.

Each person has their own strengths, but a worthwhile team member should be able to meet minimum requirements of readability and comments. This can be enforced through team agreements and peer review.

Your second point is really the crux of business in a lot of ways. The balance of quality versus quantity. Cost versus value. Long-term versus short term gains. I’m sure there are situations where ruthlessly prioritizing short term profit through low cost code is indeed the optimal solution. For those of us who love to craft high-quality code, the trick is finding the companies where it is understood and agreed that long-term value from high-quality code is worth the upfront investment and, more importantly, where they have the cash to make that investment.

>I’m sure there are situations where ruthlessly prioritizing short term profit through low cost code is indeed the optimal solution

This is mostly how large publicly traded corps work, unless they are ran by programmers that want great applications or are required by law, they tend to write a lot of crap.

>In addition companies don't seem to give a shit about straightforward code, they want LOC per day and the cheapest price possible which leads to tons of crap code.

Companies don't care about LOC, they care about solving problems. 30 LOC or 30k LOC doesn't matter much MOST of the time. They're just after a solution that puts the problem to rest.

If a delivery company has four different definitions of a customer’s first order, and the resulting code has contents that are hard to parse - does the Blake lie with the developer, or the requirements?

If the developer had time to do it, with him. Otherwise with the company

I'm sure there's some abysmal shit that's extremely hard to properly abstract. Usually the dev just sucks or they didn't have time to make the code not suck

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