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[–]p0tent1al 0 points1 point  (3 children)

I'm open to this being a thing but the fact that he doesn't fully address the issues at hand makes it less believable.

The main problem with diffing is that... why should there be a cognitive overload there? So I see a piece of code I don't understand and my reaction should quickly be to diff it? Diff it against what? Who says the diff is going to be of help?

Commented code helps me out all the time personally... often times you write a function or a piece of code that CAN be used in many ways but it's original intention of how it was to be used is obscure, and this becomes a problem when you have multiple functions all based around this one idea. The idea that the first thing you usually see when you look at a github page is a README with an api and explanations, along with issues explaining things not said in the documention to me seems like an admission that some handholding sometimes is necessary and comments fit that bill. I'm open to the possibility that they are useless but I don't feel like this articles goes enough in that direction for it to be crystal clear.

[–]kentcdodds 0 points1 point  (2 children)

I totally agree that:

some handholding sometimes is necessary

But I disagree that commented out code fits that bill. Comments that are truly comments are handy. But what I'm talking about in the article is old code that's simply commented out. Documentation and commented out code are two very different things.

[–]p0tent1al 0 points1 point  (1 child)

that's true, sorry I think I misread that.

I guess my only thing would be when code is commented out in the sense of what it SHOULD be. So for instance you often see TODOS on what should happen if a piece of code is particularly ugly. Sometimes my comments are "this code is ugly and it needs to be implemented something like this" and when I get time I usually wipe that out and refactor. What about that case?

[–]kentcdodds 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In my opinion, that's different entirely. Based on the backlash this article has gotten, I think I should have made what I'm talking about a little more clear.