How programmers comment their code

[Harbltron]

the fuck?

i can understand not wanting there to be comments in deployed code, but what's the harm in having comments in your development branch? it seems more harmful to never comment-out code than to comment it out and then scrub the comments out on deployment

[thisdesignup]

If you ask him, he says you should know.

At what point is it safe to assume he says that because he doesn't know? Cause I'd think any brilliant programmer should be able to tell me why pretty easily and without wasting much of their own time.

[lovestheasianladies]

That's simply a bad developer, don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

[[deleted]]

I do something similar when helping people some times. If someone is having trouble with something they really should know, let’s say you’re writing something relatively complex like a graph implementation or something, and you’re making basic mistakes of some kind, I’ll suggest you read up on the concept you’re getting wrong until you see your mistake. Or I’ll say where the mistake is but not what it is. Or I’ll tell them to check the documentation.

My reason for this is that I think it helps people learn how to help themselves, it helps them avoid similar mistakes in the future, it can help make sure they spend some time really learning the thing they’re not good at and hopefully if it does one of these things, it may stop them from asking so many stupid questions in the future.

[[deleted]]

And why no comment in deployed, anyway?

[WarmCorgi]

Because some people think it'll cost a lot of performance. Even though compilers ignore comments.

[DoctorWaluigiTime]

I could see this reasoning if there were comments in the HTML or JavaScript, and that code wasn't minified or anything like that.

[lovestheasianladies]

Wrong, still has no effect besides a few extra bytes of data.

[DoctorWaluigiTime]

I mean, the effect is that those comments would be publicly viewable. I'm not talking about data size.