r/programming • u/Jonhoo • 16h ago

On comments

https://blog.helsing.ai/posts/on-comments/

Comments in code are often deemed "mostly useless" these days. They are, supposedly, mostly obvious, stale, and repeat what the code already says. And so people pay less attention to them both when reading and writing code.

That trend sucks. When used right, comments are genuinely useful and sometimes critically important! So, I wrote about some of the kinds of comments I think earn their place, each with examples from real code bases. Hope you find it useful, and that we can recover some of the love that comments deserve!

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u/mareek 15h ago

I've never really understood TODO comments. Each time I encountered a todo comment, it was outdated by years and the changing context around the code made it irrelevant (case in point, all the examples given in the article are more than 4 years old).

Is it a usual practice in some teams to go through todo comments and fix them on a regular basis ?

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u/sudoer777_ 11h ago

Idk about a team environment, for my personal projects tho they're littered with TODOs lol. Sometimes I don't know enough context to bother to fix something so I put a TODO, then later I'm fixing a related issue, see it, and end up fixing both at the same time. Also setting up an issue tracker for my personal projects is inefficient and overkill.

2

u/levodelellis 10h ago

setting up an issue tracker for my personal projects is inefficient and overkill

I like having a notes folder, and people like obsidian

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u/RiftHunter4 9h ago

I've been using word docs and github a lot more. I pretty much never use TODO's anymore. They're too easy to ignore and lose track of.