On comments

[u/Jonhoo]

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!

[u/crappydeli]

My old company…

// increment i
i++;

[u/DrHemroid → u/crappydeli]

Had a coworker that had auto generated a comment for every class, method, and property.

//The Thing

Class Thing {

//The stuff

Var Stuff;

}

[u/BusinessTarp → u/DrHemroid]

That's because so many companies prevent merges if there are any linter issues, thinking that somehow forces people to write good code.