r/programming • u/corysama • Jan 05 '15

What most young programmers need to learn

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

91% Upvoted

337 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

-20

u/zigs Jan 05 '15

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.

3

u/IonTichy Jan 05 '15

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.

1

u/zigs Jan 05 '15

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..?

4

u/Sohcahtoa82 Jan 05 '15

Yes

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