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Used to hate code comments until a senior dev showed me a messy function from 3 years ago

I always thought comments were a waste of time because the code should speak for itself. Then last month a senior dev at work pulled up a function I wrote 3 years ago that had zero comments and was a complete mess. I couldn't even figure out what it did without spending 20 minutes tracing variables. He showed me the same function after he added 5 comments, and it suddenly made sense in under 2 minutes. Has anyone else had that moment where something you ignored suddenly clicked?

3 comments

3 Comments

wendy_henderson217d ago

Totally disagree, comments just get outdated and lie to you later.

jenny_lee7d ago

Oh man, I feel you on this but hear me out. Honestly, the trick is to not treat comments like some permanent truth, you know? I always add a date to my updates so people can see when I wrote it, just like a timestamp on a save file. Ngl, I also try to edit old comments if I find out I was wrong, so the info stays useful. Tbh, it's more about being helpful in the moment than trying to be right forever.

bailey.jennifer7d ago

Wait, have you ever gone back and read something you wrote five years ago and just cringed so hard you wanted to delete your whole account? Honestly, I found a comment I left on a guitar forum back in 2018 about that one brand of strings, and I was so confident about it. Ngl, I was dead wrong about the whole thing, but at the time I felt like a genius. Tbh, I think wendy_henderson21 has a point about comments getting outdated, but I guess for me it's more about the journey of learning out loud. Like, my old dumb takes are kinda fun to laugh at now, and at least when I fixed them later, someone got the right info eventually.