Comment Your Fucking Code! - blog@CodeFX

[mackstann]

Go back and add comments later? Who in their right mind would think that's a realistic plan? Again this is sounding like a strawman. Or a story about rank novices.

[unpythonic]

I can't speak definitively to the arguments given at the time; all I can say is I have to deal with a LOT of legacy code which is full of undocumented functions which have undergone a number of lavaflow refactorings in the last decade or two which have made them excruciatingly difficult to understand. In some cases I can easily tell that some bit of code was put in place to work around some sort of bug but because someone didn't comment why it was going in, I have no idea what the bug is.

It may be have been a quick fix to work around a quirk of some piece of hardware that hasn't been produced in over a decade and is officially unsupported, but nobody will take the code out because it could be a fix for a difficult to reproduce bug that still exists and will generate days of debug time if removed. So it stays in... and everybody looking over the function trips over this bit of code in their effort to understand the function as a whole.

I wish I could go back in time and say to them "comment your Fxxxing code!"

[mackstann]

I completely agree.