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Comment by michaelcampbell | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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.

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.

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