On: I Love Ruby

[jacobsenscott]

I can probably count on one hand the number of comments I've written a comment in over a decode of coding ruby. I've never encountered code I couldn't understand just from reading the code. It really just isn't done in the ruby world. And good - comments are just noise in any language. You need to read the code because comments are wrong often enough (and 1% of the time is more than often enough) you can never trust them.

Consider the overhead of a comment - first you need to read the comment because they are always above the code so that's what your brain will do. This will prejudice your reading of the code.

Then you need to read the code while trying to block the comment prejudice out of your mind.

Then you need to sort of mentally diff the comment and the code, and if the comment is wrong (spoiler...) decide if you are going to delete the comment (the best choice, unless you get a code reviewer who likes comments) or fix the comment (the worst choice, a waste of time, but maybe the only way to get it through code review).

Now consider code without a comment: you just read the code.

[t-writescode → jacobsenscott]

Sometimes you just need comments. I’ve written graphing algorithms that traverse databases in Ruby. I named functions well, too; but the actions I was doing were so weird without sufficient context that when someone might need to change it, 6 months or a year from now, they would have absolutely no idea why I was doing. And no amount of clean code patterns, nor code as documentation patterns would have clarified what was being done as much as the multi-paragraph with ascii art comment I wrote above the function.

Sometimes you just need comments.

[tines → jacobsenscott]

You're still stuck in the mindset that the comment is about what the code is doing. Good comments are orthogonal to the code they're attached to.