At my last job, I was assigned to a project being run by a straight-out-of-college developer who felt that not only were comments unnecessary, they were actually a "code smell", a sign of professional incompetence on the part of whoever added them. It's an insane philosophy that could only appeal to people who have never had to take over an old codebase.

[–] CodeBlooded@programming.dev 6 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Or, it appeals to people that have had had to take over an old codebase where the comments were all lies.

“Code never lies. Comments sometimes do.”

[–] ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 2 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

It's funny, the exact same logic applies to method and variable names. There's no compiler that ensures that a method's name accurately describes what the method does or ensures that a variable's name accurately describes what the variable represents. Yet nobody ever says "you shouldn't use descriptive method and variable names because they might be misleading". And this is hardly academic: I can't count the number of times I've run into methods that no longer do what the method name implies they do.

And yet method and variable names are exactly what people mean when they talk about "self-documenting" code.

[–] CodeBlooded@programming.dev 2 points 11 hours ago

That’s fair!

[–] DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 2 points 20 hours ago

I don't know that I could have stopped myself from asking whose nephew they are and I'm just a hobbyist