To comment or not?...
summary
Runs a survey with 167 respondents and reports a near 50/50 split on whether code should be self‑documenting versus using inline comments, after an initial nine Twitter replies. Shows concrete examples: a BeautifulSoup scraper with messy commented-out trials, ASCII diagrams and docstring use, and mentions Django’s spaghetti and meatballs package. Claims empathy and staged guidance help new programmers move from ad hoc comments to maintainable documentation.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:23Comments as early docs
- 2:51Risks of too many comments
- 6:16Bad commenting examples
- 9:10What makes a comment useful
- 10:13Commenting best practices
- 13:11New programmers and comments
- 15:44Survey on commenting habits
- 19:43Comments reveal struggles
- 21:08Supporting newer programmers
- 22:40Q&A
