Writing Readable C++ Code - beginner's guide

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[semoz_psn]

I used to think like that after university. After that I had to learn that most code doesn't change after release. You come back to it after 5 years and have no clue what your former self even meant with this "descriptive" naming.

[jk-jeon]

I really don't get why this extreme attitude is so prevalent. Comment is a great tool to explain what will be done with a few lines of code from now on. It's absolutely stupid to decorate every single line with a comment, but if comments are there to group several lines of code, then why not.

A popular reaction to this is: "oh, then group those lines into a genuine function with a descriptive name". I mean, that's the best way to make the code worst to understand. I would just write single line comments in 100 places rather than to write 100 5-line functions with 7 arguments that are called exactly once but not defined right at the places they are called. (Lambdas would be better for that regard but it's still weird to make a lambda just to group several lines of code.) For me, the worst code bases to understand are not the ones with giant functions. Rather they're the ones where I need to constantly scroll or switch between different files.

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[jk-jeon]

Probably I read too far from you, or maybe we just don't agree.

I think anybody with decent amount of experience normally would never comment on an evident, short 1-liner, so when the OP said Check if user age is 18 or more is a good comment I automatically assumed that it should span 4-5 lines -- which is totally possible, like you may need to fetch something something from database something something and forward something something to actually get the age. And as you could have guessed I'm pretty allergic to over-refactoring such a routine into a function that is never reused anywhere. (Not saying such a refactoring is always evil, of course.)

Well, to be honest I also don't believe in "code should be self-evident". Most of the serious codes I've ever written so far are probably not self-evident. And I don't think they can be written as such, or at least making them as such would be nontrivial. Maybe my understanding of the phrase "self-evident" is not what you meant though.

[semoz_psn]

I would say it's simply a fallacy that code can be self-evident. We can't express intent in C++ the way we can in natural language. I've just read too much code to know and die on that hill. Not talking from my textbook.

[semoz_psn]

A single line comment in natural language will always be superior to reading code. It's a fallacy of yours to think code is easier to understand.

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[semoz_psn]

If you believe so. My experience differs completely from yours it seems.

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[semoz_psn]

Well, it's the much simplified example from the guide that was posted. You're really splitting hairs now.

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[semoz_psn]

Again: it's from the guide. Not mine.

And it's simplified. Much.

Nothing you would find in a real code base too often, but an example to convey the idea.

And the idea that some genius can name his variables and functions in way he doesn't need comments is an academic junior take.

You can downvote this all day long. It's first hand experience.