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

I agree with almost all of what you say, but the thing IME is that in most cases people learn to comment a lot, which results in comments that feel like they've been done just for the sake of it, which is one of the main problems IMO. It's not like "just add a comment, it won't hurt", since comments can be immensely misleading and literally take a lot of time until figuring out that the comment was wrong if you trust the wrong ones.

I also agree that this tends to be worse with bad code, which also is not surprising. Sometimes it feels to me like people think they can fix bad code with some comments, and I think that is far from being true.

I also admit that especially the title of the article might be a bit provocative, but giving the general positive sentiment of comments I think this is called for. Sometimes you have to exaggerate a bit to get some attention. I don't like click-baiting either, but unfortunately it works ;-)