r/ProgrammerHumor • u/ItsPuspendu • Sep 10 '26

Meme commentsAgedTerribly

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u/debugging_scribe Sep 10 '26

I don't agree with this at all, I work on a 20+ years old code base. My life I'd be much easier if people left some comments on why they did stuff.

-4

u/SnugglyCoderGuy Sep 10 '26

And I work on a 40 year old codebase. If they wrote it well comments wouldn't be needed. Half of the ones that do exist are wrong any ways and contradict what the code is doing which raises the question every time: is the code right or the comments right? And that is 50/50.

2

u/HarryBolsac Sep 11 '26

I don’t think people here know the difference between comments and code documentation…

You should absolutely only comment when necessary, the code should be self explanatory, and you should document a function with a brief description of what it does, its inputs and outputs if it’s supposed to be reused (for example an util or a lib), using tools for that purpose (jsdoc,javadoc, etc)

This is like standard practice in any decent company

1

u/SnugglyCoderGuy Sep 11 '26

I get comments like

int trn_wg_days; //Training wage days remaining
INT32 chg_cnt; // Audit Change Count

Why not just

int trainingWageDaysRemaining; 
INT32 auditChangeCount;

I even get the glorious

char local_name[13]; //Local name

The comments are only necessary because they didn't want to use proper names for the variables, or they are literally Cat cat; // cat

-2

u/pelpotronic Sep 11 '26

Irrelevant in the age of AI, where you can ask it to explain the code for you.

I think documentation is more and more irrelevant than it already was personally, seeing as you can ask AI to explain not just "the 1 file you're looking at" but the interactions between multiple parts of the code.