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Thought exercise: If comments are often considered harmful because of their lacking quality, why would commit messages be considered helpful when they suffer f
by falcolas 4y ago
Thought exercise:
If comments are often considered harmful because of their lacking quality, why would commit messages be considered helpful when they suffer from similar issues?
- marcosdumay 4y agoOne reason is that commit messages do not become stale. Anyway, software development as a whole decided on a pretty stable set of comments that are considered helpful. Commit messages are clearly in there, as well as API elements description.
- staticassertion 4y ago> software development as a whole decided on a pretty stable set of comments that are considered helpful. I have no idea what you're talking about.
- usrusr 4y agoIn addition to the staleness argument (which is somewhat countered by its inverse: the good, helpful commit message might be hidden under a huge layer of naming convention changes and the like), there's also the off by default. A comment always helps itself to some mental bandwidth, whereas the commit is nicely tidied away unless you ask for it.