this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2025
1010 points (99.1% liked)
Programmer Humor
27322 readers
895 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.”
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.
That’s fair!