Comments on: If Self-Documenting Code is the What, Unit Tests are the Why

By: master plastic

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By: Alistair Rigney

Alistair Rigney — Mon, 03 May 2010 07:07:48 +0000

@tcmaster
Thanks for your comments mate, however I think that you are barking up the wrong tree, if you are using a case tool or some other design tool to design your system then this is the place to put your serious comments in that will clarify your design to the developer, comments in text boxes, assocations, aggregations etc in UML diagrams are very important to give a developer a quick description of your ideas.
Other comments in code can be useful where you think this will clarify the code, after all this is implementation detail that can be very cryptic. I am rather suspicious of people who want to get rid of things that normal people normally do, this sounds like some sort of religious fundamentalism. Here is an example, what about a truth table, if this is in the design then I would expect to see this as a comment in the code.
Regards,
Alistair

By: Ed Evans

Ed Evans — Sun, 02 May 2010 18:23:58 +0000

@Bill Sorensen I like "Vomments" as in "he vomments all over his code"

By: Bill Sorensen

Bill Sorensen — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 17:21:20 +0000

Can I be the first to coin the word “zomments”?

By: Steve Py

Steve Py — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 00:36:29 +0000

That’s a signature old-school development style, pre-VCS. I’ve had to ween several developers out of the habit of commenting change history, or worse, commenting out old, replaced code when they’re using a perfectly good code repository. The comments about why something was changed are best served as comments in the change log. A simple diff says a hell of a lot more about “what” changed than any comment could.

The best way to break this habbit is to show them something better. Demonstrate how meaningful comments in Subversion or TFS change history say how code is evolving ever so much more clearly than a comment in code. Of course, if everyone else *isn’t* writing meaningful check-in comments then you’re up a crik without a piddle.

By: tcmaster

tcmaster — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 16:42:28 +0000

Interesting and I fully agree. But on the other hand, I should say 90% (or more) of the programmers have not read about “clean code”(the book), nor even they heard about removing comments. I personally know some ones who is still writing codes like:
// fix bug ticket XXXX start
some code
// fix bug ticket XXXX end

so how do we handle them? Normally if there is just one guy like this in a team, then everything will be polluted sooner or later.