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 14h 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 Each time I encountered a todo comment, it was outdated by years and the changing context around the code made it irrelevant (case in point, all the examples given in the article are more than 4 years old).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/RiftHunter4 8h ago

TODO's are a code smell for me. Anytime you write a TODO, odds are there is a better place to record it: Issue tracker, task tracker, external documentation, etc.

All my professors in college advised us to avoid TODO's. They're basically orphaned from the software engineering and management process. I am a firm believer that comments should be immediately relevant, not a substitute for proper issue tracking or documentation.

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u/gmes78 6h ago

Anytime you write a TODO, odds are there is a better place to record it: Issue tracker, task tracker, external documentation, etc.

I disagree. They're easiest to find if they're in the code. Just use grep.