I used to think comment-heavy code was for noobs until I had to debug a 500-line function I wrote three months ago at 2am

Spent four hours tracing variable names because I skipped the // notes, never again, anyone else been burned by their own overconfidence?

3 comments

3 Comments

young.michael1d ago

I used to think comment-heavy code was for noobs" - yeah that part got me too, I felt the same way until I hit my own wall. But here's what I'm wondering: when you finally went back to fix that 500-line function, did you end up adding comments to it or did you just refactor it into smaller pieces? Because I've found that if I break it down into smaller functions with clear names, I barely need comments at all. The comments I do keep are only for the weird edge cases where the code looks wrong but it's actually right. Like when you have to add a sleep() call to wait for some async thing that should already be done, that's worth a comment. Comments about what the function does overall though, those just seem like noise once you split things up.

emma961d ago

@kai_chen2 nailed it with the "don't touch this unless you understand why it's cursed" thing. For me, I always add a tiny comment right before the weird fix with the date and what broke, so future me knows it wasn't just bad code.

kai_chen21d ago

Totally been there. I refactored mine into like six smaller functions and threw away half the comments. Now the only comments I keep are the "don't touch this unless you understand why it's cursed" kind, like when you're doing something janky to work around a library bug.