Sometimes, as you become a better programmer, a comment that you thought were a "why" comment is now clearly a "what" comment. One programmer's "magic super-eff

Sometimes, as you become a better programmer, a comment that you thought were a "why" comment is now clearly a "what" comment. One programmer's "magic super-efficient pointer gymnastics" in C is another programmer's standard idiom. When working on a large project as a team, most of the project may be run-of-the-mill code for most of the team, and so it doesn't warrant "what" comments. However, there will be times when you have to introduce coding idioms that are foreign to everyone on the team, in which case a "what" comment may be warranted. For example, a standard 5 year old React codebase probably used to contain a lot of class-based components and now is probably switching to function-based components with hooks. I know the first time I did a code review on my colleague's code that introduced some weird hook concept - I asked for some more comments to explain what magic was going on. I would probably not ask for such a comment today now that everyone is more or less familiar with hooks and function-based components.