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(lemm.ee)
Comment from my group project teammate. You don't need to comment every line lol
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this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
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I am not a programmer, I just barely wrote one bash script in the past. But I'd say more comments are better than too few.
When I later wanted to edit it, I got completely lost. I wrote it with absolutely no comments.
Bash is a shit „language” and everytime i need to write the simplest thing in it I forget which variable expansion I should use and how many spaces are the right amount of spaces. It’s impossible to write nice to read bash, but even in C you can write code that comments itself.
It's perfectly possible to write nice to read bash, and to also make is safe to run and well-behaved on errors.
But all the three people that can do those (I'm not on the group) seem to be busy right now.
Yeah you lost me at well behaved.
Still better than powershell though
bash sucks but i don’t agree. Some simple rules like regularly use intermediate variables with useful names and never use shorthand arguments goes a long way.
I've been programming for almost 25 years and I'd still rather see too many comments than too few. A dogmatic obsession with avoiding comments screams "noob" just as much as crummy "add 1 to x" comments. If something is complex or non-obvious I want a note explaining why it's there and what it's supposed to do. This can make all the difference when you're reviewing code that doesn't actually do what the comment says it should.
While this is true, an alternative is to name your variables and functions descriptively so that when you see
number_of_catsyou know that variable is the number of cats, andbuyAnotherCat()is a function that increases the number of cats.Wrong. Too many comments makes the code messy and less readable and also it provides ZERO value. Just look at the post, WHAT is useful about ANY of that comment???
All it is is a waste of goddamn space, literal junk crowding the actual code.
I love how you admit you aren’t a developer but feel quite confident to tell us that a larger number of comments automatically means it’s better.
This person articulated it better than I: https://midwest.social/comment/10319821
Too many is still better than too few, and it's not close. Useless comments make parsing a bit harder. Missing comments can mean hours of research.
These are arguments talking past each other. Sure 1 useful comment and 9 redundant ones can be better than zero, but comments are not reliable and often get overlooked in code changes and become misleading, sometimes critically misleading. So often the choice is between not enough comments versus many comments that you cannot trust and will sometimes tell you flat-out lies and overall just add to the difficulty of reading the code.
There's no virtue in the number of comments, high or low. The virtue is in the presence of quality comments. If we try to argue about how many there should be we can talk past each other forever.