Re:Reducing technical debt by valuing comments as much as code
by galangalalgol on Tuesday January 31, 2023 @10:36PM
(#34606021)
How about "code does what it does but comments say what it might have once, and possibly still might do?"
You can have your pipeline regression test code, but not comments. Just recently my mentee found some of my code where I had changed the code but not the comment. I'm a horrible human and wasted his time. If that comment hadn't existed the code might have taken a moment to understand but as it was, he wasn't sure which was the intent.
Code can deceive even if, definitionally, the code states what the computer will do. So code most certainly can lie.
[By analogy, you'd still feel lied to if someone told you something that is technically correct but very misleading: "(Me) It's going to rain tomorrow." → tomorrow comes → "(You) It isn't raining today!" → "(Me) It is raining, in Japan. I didn't say it would rain here."]
I suppose it depends on whether you're considering what the code communicates to the machine or what it communicates to a person.