• AdmiralShat@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    If you don't add comments, even rudimentary ones, or you don't use a naming convention that accurately describes the variables or the functions, you're a bad programmer. It doesn't matter if you know what it does now, just wait until you need to know what it does in 6 months and you have to stop what you're doing an decipher it.

    • fkn@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Self documenting code is infinitely more valuable than comments because then code spreads with it’s use, whereas the comments stay behind.

      I got roasted at my company when I first joined because my naming conventions are a little extra. That lasted for about 2 months before people started to see the difference in legibility as the code started to change.

      One of the things I tell my juniors is, “this isn’t the 80s. There isn’t an 80 character line limit. The computer doesn’t benefit from your short variable names. I should be able to read most lines of code as a single non-compound sentence in English with only minor tweaks and the English sentence should be what is happening in most of those lines of code.”