- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
You must log in or register to comment.
It’s thing! Omni-man says ‘thing’, not ‘part’. I’ve seen this meme format for a few years now and I’ve only just realised it’s a misquote after watching the show. Completely irrelevant nitpick I know but some people might appreciate it.
The entire purpose of writing good readable code which is mostly self-explanatory and were it isn’t it’s properly commented to explain what’s going on, is so that it it’s not a necessary for the person who picks it up later to be somebody who does remember what that code does and how it does it.
Whilst this is mainly important to allow other people to work in that code, as a side effect the actual person who wrote the code if they follow those coding principles needs not remember what it does and how it does it.
One of the upsides of being a senior dev is having figured this kind of thing out from experience, which offsets the downside that since you’re older and have done a ton of things, it’s less likely that you will properly remember the details of a specific code base after some months of not looking at it.
This one always spoke to me. But I work on embedded systems so I get to fiddle with physical equipment to really make sure the code works.
Which is why making code readable is so very important. Our juniors and students will think we’re ridiculous, when we spend a long time cleaning up some code or choosing the least misunderstandable name for a type. But you fuck that up and then others, as well as your future self, will be wasting many more minutes misunderstanding what your code does.
I treat my future self a few months from now as a separate person who does not remember anything about why or what the specific code fragments do. And I’m grateful to my past self for doing the same.
Plus, you never know when you need to actually delegate supporting a particular piece of a solution to another person.
Write your code as if the next person that works with it is a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
Readable code is especially important when companies lay people off every six months so you constantly lose expertise
This made me chortle. I remember when I first joined a dev team asking someone how many of something their section should be able to store:
I don’t know, I’d have to look at the code.
It was an eye opening moment. Very few people can keep everything in their head. I’ve met a couple. They were rockstars who were truly exceptional.
For me it all depends on how often a project changes. If it’s constantly in flux, I don’t bother remembering any of it because I might not be the last one who touched it. The more you try to remember everything, the more wrong you become due to the successive work of your coworkers.
deleted by creator
Bonus points for the cedilla
Spamming comments is rather controversial, especially in high-level languages. Problem is, they only show up in one place, so they’re just not very useful, but also have a high chance of becoming inaccurate over time. In particular when you spam them to explain relatively trivial stuff, people will stop reading them, meaning they won’t update them.
The ‘what’ can be documented with meaningful variable/function names, log/error/assert messages and perhaps most importantly unit/integration tests (which should be understood like a specification that checks automatically that it’s applied correctly).
Comments are indispensible for explaining the ‘why’, though, whenever that is not obvious.
Yeah, there’s a balance. If you comment every row of your code, you aren’t naming things clearly. If you never comment, the context is always incomplete.
You don’t comment what something does, ir can clearly be seen from the code itself. You comment why you do it.
Yes, that would be the context I’m talking about
“Clearly” is also subjective. What might be perfectly clear to me reading my own code may be really confusing to someone else, and vice versa. Especially if the person reading the code isn’t as familiar with the language as the person who wrote it, or if the code is using some syntactic sugar that isn’t super common, or plenty of other reasons.
True. It’s more like there’s no need to comment an if statement with “checks if a is larger than b”
I’m also not a programmer, you’ll find my longest comments to explain why I’ve done some terrible mangling, what this does and how.
a good code doesn’t require comments.
Commenta should only exist to explain external requirement leading to a functionality being unexpected.
Hello fellow basher.
You dont. Thats why you write comments!
You dont. Thats why you write code that explains itself. For higher level info you write documentation.
Yes. And also comments :-)
The only moment you write comments is when you are doing something extremely weird for a specific reason that will not be immediately obvious and you want to warn the person doing a refactor in the future. In any other case, writing self documenting code is the way. If you are unable to do that, then your code needs to be rewrtitten.
Self documenting code is a myth as what’s self documenting to one person is not to the next. Code comments and process/workflow documentation is needed for a healthy codebase.
I thought the same, until I spent a few years on a codebase where self-documenting code was enforced with detailed code reviews. That does a very good job of clearing up the ambiguity.
If you can’t get that kind of review, then by all means use comments.
Lmao. Sure buddy.
♫tale as old as time♫ ♫opinions that are mine♫
Not really an opinion when most companies run on self documenting code since time immemorial.
Try handing over your “self documenting code” to a junior dev who doesn’t know the language it’s written in and see how far they get with it.
Now hand that exact same codebase with comments to the same junior dev, and I guarantee you they’ll get further than without the comments.
I have given well documented code to plenty of juniors, it comes with being a senior dev / techlead. And it was perfectly understood. Maybe you simply don’t write self documenting code.
Mmmm kind of? I wouldn’t categorize most comments as describing “extremely weird” reasons, though. Code will generally explain the “how”, while comments can describe the “why”. For example, think of an enum with ViewSize “mini” and “full”. It might be nice to have a comment to briefly summarize what ViewSize is meant to represent, and maybe link to a spec. Basically, a comment here will connect the intention with the implementation.
A more inline-comment example of this might be if there’s a slightly nuanced case that you want to be very clear about, ala maybe a Javascript true/false/null case, where you might be checking === false, and specifically don’t want someone to refactor it into a falsy check. Kind of contrived example , but that sort of thing. This is probably more the “extremely weird” comment you’re talking about; almost just a warning that this might not be what you think it is.
The other common use-case I find good for comments is for summarizing the goals/purpose of a complex function. This is mostly for future people who might utilize this function, and don’t want to read through a bunch of code, just to remember the nuances of what it’s supposed to do. For example, a “sortEvents” function, you may want to summarize the business requirements of the sort at the top. Although, this kind of thing may be different depending on how documentation is stored.
Code never lies; comments sometimes do.
As an undergraduate, I wondered how it was possible to write code professionally, because I could only barely fit the semester-long programming assignment in my head. When I asked my professor about it, I got an independent study credit to learn about UML.
UML (as a representative example of thoughtful documentation) is a partial answer. But actually a much larger part is that with practice I can hold a lot more code in my head. Today, that semester project seems trivial and if I see a stack trace I can tell you how to fix the bug that caused that exception to get thrown.
As a senior dev, I’d answer “how do you remember what your code does?” with
- As you work, you get better at just remembering
- As you find patterns and follow them, you’ll have less to remember (I bet I know what the
downloadUnpackUpdate()method does!) - As you do the first two, you’ll learn to recognize when comments are helpful
I’m still waiting for the day I see UML in a professional context. My undergrad teachers were all about it.
Similarly, I don’t design software using design patterns, and I’ve had to discourage juniors from forcing them into projects where they don’t add any value. But that’s not to say design patterns aren’t useful. They do exactly what you say, allowing your brain to recognise a pattern so you can remember or communicate it without having to go into details. Most of the time it won’t be an exact fit for the ideal pattern implementation, but it’s still easier to remember the variation.
I wish they were taught more as communication and cognitive tools than silver bullets for good software design.
In the real world there aren’t even that many patterns. On a very large project you’re likely to see the same patterns repeated throughout the system, because a good architecture doesn’t add variation and complexity unless there’s a lot of value to gain. You learn the default way, and then the diffs.
Actual UML-according-to-some-books is old and unpopular now. I think C4 is taking its place, in that I’ve seen architect-types ask for it. More generally, I really like PlantUML and the prettier-looking Mermaid which both allow me to code diagrams using a text document.
Yeah, I agree: academia gets people expecting to go, “give me 2x Visitor Pattern, then 1 Builder Pattern, then as many Divide and Conquers as you need to reach the end”. It can be nice to have a name for things, but most of the time I’m asking for, “see how the setup, actual work, and cleanup are nicely divided up? Do like that.” Or, “let’s put all the related endpoints in the same file.”
You don’t remember, thats what comments are for!
deleted by creator
Oh I remember what it does…I do not remember how it does.
For anything that doesn’t seem entirely obvious I try to leave a comment. It could end up being helpful to me some time later, because let’s face it: your code is indistinguishable from someone else’s code 2 weeks after you commit it.
For anything
that doesn’t seem entirely obviousI try…I’ve come to teach myself that I have no idea what “entirely obvious” is.
This function is 3 lines long why am I boggled by it right now? I should have written a commentWell, over time, you accumulate some judgment about things like that. But you have some point too.
Yeah, it’s honestly mostly an issue of me dipping into programming and not properly sticking to it for long enough to wrap my mind around some concepts. I heard all the warnings that “learning to program is usually one of the hardest things someone has accomplished” because of how late we learn it and all the other complications. I also, however, have heard my whole life that I learned fast and picked things up easily. Boy oh boy was one of those messages more useful than the other lol
I usually ask AI to summarize it and then I get a pretty good idea of what it was meant to do. It’s just another tool to me. AI generated code sucks but it’s nice when it’s a quick summary.
This is a solid use of AI.
Basically the equivalent of saying “Take a look at these characters and run it against a huge database to see if you find anything similar with documentation of its purpose”
It’s a great tool. Summaries are fantastic and “what would be a good way to code this snippet” often teaches me something new.
I also find it’s helpful to ask about best practices when I’m not sure.
Anything beyond short scripts, though, and you’re going to spend more time than you saved fixing it.
Yep, having a shitty memory makes me write better code lol
The code is so convoluted the programmer has no idea how it works. Just tables and arrays references each other.
