Reducing technical debt by valuing comments as much as code

Re:Reducing technical debt by valuing comments as much as code by claytonjy on Tuesday January 31, 2023 @04:15PM (#34602247)

I worked at a late-stage Rails-based startup that had "dont write comments" as an engineering principle!

The python folks before me used this to avoid writing docstrings for modules/classes/methods, so code could only be understood by reading the entirety of it. Throw in some deep class hierarchies and it was very hard to onboard there.

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Re:Reducing technical debt by valuing comments as much as code by makeitdouble on Wednesday February 01, 2023 @03:48AM (#34608060)

TBF, deep class hierarchies will hard to onboard whatever you do.

If you're relying on comments to help with that, you'll have to share the same mindset as the person writing the comments, except there's probably multiple years of understanding gap between you and them.

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