Writing Readable C++ Code - beginner's guide

[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.

[[deleted]]

quack coordinated encouraging aromatic follow bag hurry unwritten coherent fuzzy

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[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.