I’m Bill I don’t comment my code (except complex parts), instead I try to make code clear, including using proper variable and function names and try to keep functions short. I don’t think I ever got lost in my own code in my 20+ years of experience. Even got complements about it.
The programming language is meant for humans to read/write, if you need to put comments to understand your code then your code sucks.
When writing basic business code, structuring the code well and having good naming standards means you shouldn’t need a ton of comments, but you should still have some. Plus, using structured function content blocks gives you intellisense in some languages and IDEs, which is important for code reuse in teams.
However, when I was doing scientific programming I’d have comments for almost every line at times where I put the mathematical formula and operations the line represents. Implementing a convolution neutral network with parameters to dynamically scale the layers or MPI stochastic simulations is much different than writing CRUD functions or basic business logic.
I don’t care how much you think your code is readable, plain text comments are readable by everyone no matter the proficiency in the programming language used. That alone can make a huge difference when you’re just trying to understand how someone handled a situation.
Comments explain why, not what. Any comments that explain what a section of code is doing would probably be better off as separated methods.
Apart from basic documentation comments, like JavaDoc or C#'s XML documentation comments.
There’s nothing limiting what a comment should be as far as I know.
As an example of what I mean, I’ve seen in a 10k+ lines python code a few lines of bit manipulation. There was a comment explaining what those lines did and why. They didn’t expect everyone to be proficient in bit manipulation but it made it so that anyone could understand anyway.
Then someone needs to change something about the code and doesn’t bother updating the comment. Now you still have uncommented code but with a comment that confuses instead of helping.
Comments are lies that will happen sometime in the future
Comments are always overlooked if gode gets refactored. Language servers can’t/won’t parse them and they’re easy to overlook.
If you name your functions/variables clearly, put complex logic into clearly named functions and keep the same level of abstraction in every function (which never exceeds roughly 50 lines), you hardly need any comments, if any.
Comments are for behavior that’s not possible to convey clearly through code.
If a block of code needs a comment, then you can easily move that block into a function and summarise the comment into a name for that function. If you can not easily move a block of code into a function, then you may need to rethink your design.
This isn’t always true of course, but it’s a good mindset to have.
The reason there are no comments in the code? Written by ChatGPT.
I hate fixing other people’s code. It is one of the reasons I don’t like letting an AI write my code first draft either.
