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.

[–] ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 13 points 1 month ago (4 children)

I kind of get the idea that code should be self-documenting, but at the same time, there's so many crazy business rules that comments are basically a necessity if nothing else other than to explain why in the hell the crazed mess that provides the required functionality for the business rules exists.

[–] PonderingPotato@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That's typically what people who advocate for less/no comments really mean. The code should self explain "what" it does, but if the "why" isn't obvious (i.e. confusing business logic) nobody argues that you shouldn't comment it. That's how I've worked in every company I've been at (and all developers around me) from 50 person start ups to >2k people. It's really common mentality with Ruby developers

[–] JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

Anyone complaining about commenting should be forced to code in assembly for a while.

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