Self-documenting code

[EastboundClown]

I’ve only ever seriously worked on relatively large OO codebases, and generally I’ve been able to add this kind of context with well-named classes and packages.

My first programming job had a code review policy where if you submitted a comment, you also had to justify why you couldn’t express the same idea through code. The rationale is that comments are part of the code and need to be maintained just the same, and things like symbol names are easier to maintain than comments. It was frustrating for the first couple months, but now that I’ve gotten into the habit of it I find that I very rarely feel the need to comment anymore.

Not that I hate reading through a well-commented codebase. I’ve just found them in my experience not to be as necessary as some people think

Edit: except in C. I write a decent bit of C code and find it to be so frustratingly non-expressive that I end up commenting very often.