> The danger of stale comments is, I feel, overblown.
Yes, because they should be, and are, largely ignored. Of course, deleting them is better than ignoring and not having them in the first place is better than deleting.
Yes, because they should be, and are, largely ignored. Of course, deleting them is better than ignoring and not having them in the first place is better than deleting.
First, other developers know that comments can grow stale, so they're unlikely to treat them as sacrosanct, although I admit to falling into that trap.
More importantly, most of the types of comments that Eric recommends can drift out of sync with the code and still be useful. Why is this code here? What happened previously that is no longer in the code? What tradeoffs have been chosen?