Andrez Sainz de Aja writes that comments are a code smell: they make us lazy. Instead of using comments to convey intent, the coding should. But that is hard, so it is easier to write dumb coding and just put the intent into comments.
Andrez Sainz de Aja writes that comments are a code smell: they make us lazy. Instead of using comments to convey intent, the coding should. But that is hard, so it is easier to write dumb coding and just put the intent into comments.
From the perspective of maintenance and technical debt: yes, you do want your code to be as clear as possible. But some languages, like assembler and mindfuck, simply weren’t designed to be semantically expressive. Assembler clearly states what is happening but not why. And mindfuck is created to be as hard to parse by humans as possible. Without a description of why things exist or what they should be doing, you’re going to have a bad time.