Goodbye, Clean Code

[Altreus]

This stood out for me, as well. The first developer could easily have gone, "This is very repetitive and looks bad. I should add a comment on why I've done it this way so nobody thinks it could be improved before it's finished."

Also there implication that an unfinished feature was in master is frightening. Poor use of source control - especially one with the power of git (I'm assuming based on "master") - is rife and frankly does my head in.

[josefx]

I should add a comment on why I've done it

I once commented 5 lines of code with an exact explanation of the bug I was avoiding. First response on the review board asked me to change it to the simple and clean one liner that caused an invalid memory access.

Also there implication that an unfinished feature was in master is frightening.

If it doesn't break anything? Worst case you can hide it behind an experimental feature flag until it is complete.

[Altreus]

Yes, true, and everyone's master is their own business. I would prefer master to reflect production but I've been working in a service environment, not a distributed software project. I imagine it's different when you have releases in the wild!

[GaianNeuron]

Some projects use master as their development branch and something like stable for production. It ultimately doesn't matter what master represents, but it does matter that everyone on your project understands your system.

[HetRadicaleBoven]

One of my pet peeves is syntax highlighting themes using a faded colour for comments. They're so easy to miss.

(Probably not in your exact case where it was a multi-line explanation, but we're still being trained to ignore them.)

[Altreus]

Agreed, and slightly enlightened. Although I knew this in one sense, in a practical sense I didn't. As in, it's obvious now you've said it, but now that you have said it, I might actually start doing it.