Interesting. I'm basically the opposite. I use `git blame` heavily and find that I can rapidly understand the intent behind some code by doing so, assuming the commit messages are well-crafted. Comments are great, where appropriate, but to achieve the same density of information you'd have to add a comment with every commit, which would probably result in a difficult-to-read codebase.
I use `git blame` heavily and find that I can rapidly
understand the intent behind some code by doing so,
assuming the commit messages are well-crafted
Me too. Once editors started displaying inline git blame information, it was pretty transformational.
But, this bogs down pretty quickly for me. Great for a single line of code, but if I'm trying to understand something that spans multiple methods or multiple files that's a lot of spelunking around the commit messages, which are a mix of whys and whats.
At their best, code comments are a really focused distillation of the current whys and should never ever contain whats.
