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That's a great answer thank you for your response, do you think it would be possible to write a plugin that auto comments code and updates the comments for part

• khedoros1 9y ago
  The rule of thumb is that comments should explain the "why", and the code itself should explain the "how", so I tend to be skeptical of documenting how something works in the comments. Say that we've got that 1% case that's irreducibly complex (i.e. clarifying/simplifying the code kills the performance of something that gets run a million times a second), where we might want to explain the "how" because the code's unclear but can't be changed. The comment itself might take the form of pseudocode representing the slower-but-clearer version of the code. Being a complex and sensitive area, you'd want to have as many tests built around it as possible, to verify that the behavior doesn't change unless it was planned in advance. Part of the code-review would be that any change in behavior (as reflected by changes to the tests) would also need to be documented in the comments. Computers are good at accurately tracking multitudes of small details (like automatically tracking all the places a piece of code is called, etc). Getting them to synthesize a summary of something's behavior ("seeing the forest instead of just the trees", the kind of thing that would be useful as a code comment) sounds like it would be interesting to research, but I don't think there's anything like that right now.