Programming

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This magazine is dedicated to discussions on programming languages, software development, and coding. Whether you are a beginner programmer or an experienced developer, this is the place for you. Here you can share your knowledge, ask questions, and engage in discussions on topics such as coding languages, software engineering, web development, and more. From the latest trends and frameworks to tips and tricks for debugging, this category covers a wide range of topics related to programming.

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Code comments are (mostly) a violation of DRY (danielrotter.at)

submitted 1 year ago by danrot@kbin.social to c/programming@kbin.social

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Comments in code are quite often a code smell. Let’s see what is suboptimal about comments and talk about some strategies to avoid them.

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[–] mindlessscrollingparrot@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

DRY is not an inviolable rule. Some of the most tedious code to debug is because somebody thinks puppies will die if they write the same pair of lines in two different places.

[–] danrot@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

I think this is one of the most common misconceptions about DRY. Just because you have two times the same line in your code base it is not automatically a violation of DRY. If you compare if a number is bigger than 18 it is definitely not a good idea to extract that part if you are comparing the hour of the day once and the age the other time. In that case it would even be bad to create an abstration, and it would not be a violation of DRY. And I agree that something like this leads to code that is hard to maintain.