I was looking at a
code review recently and was reminded of the old piece of advice I once
received: "God comments in code do
not explain what the code does, they
explain why the code does what it
does."
I agree
completely. I was looking at some code
to validate we use the correct font. The
code would change from normal, to Light, to Bold, etc… and preceding each of
those commands was a comment that said "Changing to Light",
"Changing to Bold, " etc.. For
a simple task like this it is not too hard to figure out why the font is being
changed. In this case, we want to
validate the Bold font, the Light font and so on. But when code gets trickier, the why the code exists becomes much more
important.
Oh, one other thing
that drives me up a wall. Typos in
comments. Seriously - if I am looking
for the word "Bold" then I want to find that word. If someone had spelled it "Blod"
then search would fail and life can become quite difficult if I need to change
the Bold font behavior everywhere it is used.
Fortunately, this doesn't happen very often, but when I see it, I
generally try to make a code change to spell the word correctly.
Questions, comments,
concerns and criticisms always welcome,
John
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