Reducing technical debt by valuing comments as much as code

Re:Reducing technical debt by valuing comments as much as code by another2another on Friday February 03, 2023 @07:51AM (#34640391)

>When the function was written, everyone probably knew what the adjustment factor was for and how it was determined, but years later, >someone's going to look at that code and have no idea

Well, to be fair that adjustment factor could be refactored to use a usefully named constant, with a helpful comment.

static const int ZEN_ADJUSTMENT = 12345; //When I wrote this only myself and God knew what this value meant, now...

int AddWithAdj(int a, int b) { return a + b + ZEND_ADJUSTMENT; }

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Re:Reducing technical debt by valuing comments as much as code by Johnny555 on Saturday February 04, 2023 @08:21PM (#34660552)

  int AddWithAdj(int a, int b) { return a + b + ZEND_ADJUSTMENT; }

And now the maintainer is going to wonder why the originally programmer defined ZEN_ADJUSTMENT just above this function, but actually used ZEND_ADJUSTMENT (which is apparently defined somewhere else in the code). By design or typo!? :-)

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