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Outdated comments that explain the business use case or purpose are still better than no comments. It gives you background information how the code evolved or w
by ascar 8y ago
Outdated comments that explain the business use case or purpose are still better than no comments. It gives you background information how the code evolved or what it was supposed to do.
It's probably because reading comments only is worse than reading code without comments, that some devs developed an aversion towards outdated comments and thus comments in general.
Comments are additional information and no source of truth, always take them as that and read code and comments.
- chris_wot 8y agoIt’s much worse in codebases that predate version control. At least a commit shows the context of why it was added.
- james_s_tayler 8y agoYeah and over the course of 2 or 3 decades of development a lot of software has moved through several different version control,ticketing systems and developers. So you wind up with files stating an author who no longer works there with an email address that the company used 3 acquisitions ago, a ticket number you aren't even sure what system it was for but you just know it isn't being used anymore and source control history that goes back 5 years out of a total 25 years of development. The entropy is real.
- chris_wot 8y agoYou just described LibreOffice!
- james_s_tayler 8y agoI just described a lot of offices.