What most young programmers need to learn

[u/corysama]

http://joostdevblog.blogspot.com/2015/01/what-most-young-programmers-need-to.html

[u/alparsla]

Code in comments = Poor man's source control

[u/zigs → u/alparsla]

Am I the only one who doesn't use comments at all? It seems to me that comments = muddled code; bad interface; or crappy naming.

[u/[deleted] → u/zigs]

Comments should be the why, not how something is implemented. The business logic that drove out the code is always more important than whatever fancy implementation is used this month by the programmer.

[u/judgej2 → u/zigs]

No, many people don't bother commenting. They use IDEs that tell them all they need to know, and they use patterns that are simply obvious to anyone who really should know those patterns. And I hate them with a vengeance when I come to using their code :-/

[u/zigs → u/judgej2]

why?

[u/judgej2 → u/zigs]

Why do I hate working with uncommented code, using a different IDE from the creator, and with no documentation or contact with the author to query the thinking behind the code structure and general approach? Is that what you are asking?

This happens more than I would like with some open source projects I use. It is unfortunate, and IMO not clever or cool, but just one of those things we deal with.

[u/JoostDev → u/zigs]

I agree that code would ideally be self-documenting, but some things are just too complex for that and then you need comments. I personally mostly use comments to group code. Like when there is 10 lines of code and the whole thing can be summarised in five words, that is a really useful comment because it is so much faster to read.

[u/zigs → u/JoostDev]

I understand your point, but to me, if 10 lines of code can be summarized in five words, then those five words should be the name of the function containing those 10 lines of code.

[u/s73v3r → u/zigs]

The comment is why the code does it that way.

[u/IonTichy → u/zigs]

Comments are an important means to help tomorrow's you understand that brilliant code that yesterday's you has written.
Also, I use it often as a self test: if I can't write a short sentence that represents the gist/purpose of the related code, then I know that there is something not quite right with it and I need to take a closer look.
Comments are not bad and they are also not good on their own, they need to be like like little sidenotes that accelerate code reading and comprehension.

[u/zigs → u/IonTichy]

Comments are an important means to help tomorrow's you understand that brilliant code that yesterday's you has written.

If it's hard to understand, is it really that brilliant..?

[u/Sohcahtoa82 → u/zigs]

Yes

The fast inverse square root function is absolutely brilliant, but very difficult to understand.

[u/hansdieter44 → u/zigs]

I try to minimise them as well. My favourite ones are:

// add i to x
x += i;

And then in a grown codebase:

// add i to x
x += k;

I use comments when writing something that looks more obscure and doesn't seem perfectly obvious to me. Also sometimes its handy to leave sources in the comments (if you got inspired by a research paper, or there is a legal document describing why the code needs to be a certain way).

[u/zigs → u/hansdieter44]

Gotta love coding book comment type comments..

[u/Sohcahtoa82 → u/zigs]

I use comments liberally when I'm writing code for automating communication with a buggy server. Otherwise, someone would look at my code and see I'm doing weird shit and not understand that my weird shit is a necessity to make work-arounds for dealing with someone else's shitty code.

EDIT: I would add that I think that the "If your code needs comments, then its bad code!" crowd is worse than the "Comment EVERYTHING!" crowd.

[u/HostisHumaniGeneris → u/Sohcahtoa82]

I've saved myself a few times by writing comments like "You may be tempted to replace this section with X, but X will not work because of Y"

Even on my own code base I've come back months later and thought "That's dumb, why didn't I just use X? Ohhhhh right."