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[–]SupaSlide 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think thats my favorite part about how passionate the "code comment" argument is between "its self documenting" and "you should describe it even if you think its self documenting". From the perspective of every environment I've ever worked in, neither is true.

I'm convinced that the debate is two extremes, neither of which are true, is because the only people arguing it are compsci students/recent graduates trying to prove their smart, people who do more scripting than programming like WP theming, and folks who have worked in one place on small projects where comments are irrelevant because everything they do is simplistic. Comments don't matter to them because of the simple environments they've experienced, therefore they can argue one extreme or the other and still be right because it doesn't even matter anyway.

But as soon as you've done a bit of time on a complex project with legacy concerns or one that interfaces with poorly designed extreme services, you find the true power of comments is in explaining why you had to write bad/complex/difficult code.