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Comment by wulczer | Hacker News Reader

  > Comments - like documentation - are a liability.

Tests, too. But you wouldn't advocate not having tests, right?

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It all comes down to: does the benefit out way the costs?

A well-maintained suite of automated tests provide an enormous benefit. A brittle set of Selenium scripts costs a project more than paying a Tester to manually run scenarios.

Yeah, I agree, it's a question of cost vs benefit.

A bunch of tests that check trivial cases is not helpful at all, a well-maintained suite of tests is very useful.

What I mean is that a bunch of documentation that only states the obvious is not helpful at all. A set of well-maintained (!) code comments can make navigating unfamiliar code much, much easier.

I can prove that tests don't function. They are exactly the opposite of comments in that way. Change the functionality? Tests fail. I know they fail. I fix them.

Yet comments can (and do) go way out of date.

Tests that are executed automatically as regression are fine. There is now way to regress with comments.

Tl;dr not equivalent.

This is one of the reasons why I'm a fan of doctests in python. Generally if the tests start to fail the documentation surrounding it needs to be updated as well, which makes it a bit easier to actually keep the documentation up to date.

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