8 ms·

If no one understands what it does, it's not perfectly good code is it? Of course there are rare cases where code cannot be simplified, made more readable or se

If no one understands what it does, it's not perfectly good code is it? Of course there are rare cases where code cannot be simplified, made more readable or self explanatory and in those cases comments are vital. But the aim should be for the vast majority of code to be easily readable by humans.

phendrenad2 6y ago
I mean it's "perfectly fine" because the people building it know how it works (because they were there when it was built), and think they don't need comments to help out future maintainers.
Jtsummers 6y ago
Essential versus accidental complexity. Perfectly good code can be unclear because of the accidental complexity included within it. Memory management, error handling (especially in languages with less expressive type systems), configuring hardware/database/network connections, etc. Those things are important, but they prevent the essential portion of the program from being expressed on its own. Type systems, a brief example: C versus Ada. Implement a network protocol where the data packet has specific n-bit sized fields with ranges less than the maximum for that size. You can easily do this in both languages. But in C, you'd either need to add bounds checking to all of those fields or risk letting errors propagate. That error handling obscures the essential portion of the program. In Ada, you make a type that is n-bits and only accepts values of the correct range. The errors can still exist in received packets, but the error checking is partially elided from the code because the type system itself can catch it. There's nothing wrong with the C code, and there's nothing wrong (many will disagree with that) with choosing C to implement the protocol. But it will increase the complexity due to factors beyond the inherent, essential complexity of the network protocol itself.

8 ms·

If no one understands what it does, it's not perfectly good code is it? Of course there are rare cases where code cannot be simplified, made more readable or se

by wanderr 6y ago

phendrenad2 6y ago
I mean it's "perfectly fine" because the people building it know how it works (because they were there when it was built), and think they don't need comments to help out future maintainers.
Jtsummers 6y ago
Essential versus accidental complexity. Perfectly good code can be unclear because of the accidental complexity included within it. Memory management, error handling (especially in languages with less expressive type systems), configuring hardware/database/network connections, etc. Those things are important, but they prevent the essential portion of the program from being expressed on its own. Type systems, a brief example: C versus Ada. Implement a network protocol where the data packet has specific n-bit sized fields with ranges less than the maximum for that size. You can easily do this in both languages. But in C, you'd either need to add bounds checking to all of those fields or risk letting errors propagate. That error handling obscures the essential portion of the program. In Ada, you make a type that is n-bits and only accepts values of the correct range. The errors can still exist in received packets, but the error checking is partially elided from the code because the type system itself can catch it. There's nothing wrong with the C code, and there's nothing wrong (many will disagree with that) with choosing C to implement the protocol. But it will increase the complexity due to factors beyond the inherent, essential complexity of the network protocol itself.