56. Comments Considered Harmful, Comments Considered Helpful

Today, we’ll be talking about whether comments are considered harmful or helpful. We’re pretty sure that there are many different comments you may have run into in your careers. Comments are something that is really common to every programmer, everyone can relate to them – whether they’ve been tormented or blessed by them. We’ve come across some pretty funny comments in the past like, “Holy crap, WTF is this?” or “Drunk, will fix later,” or “Magic, do not touch,” or just the standard, “I’m sorry.” Aside from their entertainment value, comments can be useful for a multiple of other reasons – such as documentation and setting to do reminders for a team. But how can we utilize comments most effectively to avoid the shame game? In this episode, we discuss how best to use comments for to-tasks, writing tests, the value of user stories, the dangers of tech debt and the almighty perils of the copypasta driven development boys. In addition, we will also discover how scout’s honor applies to code (as well as to developers from the Bronx), why a comment is the only code that can lie to you and how you can quite simply avoid comments altogether.