To comment or not
summary
Argues that comments are practical signals not philosophy citing a messy but working climbing wall scraper built with BeautifulSoup and Stack Overflow snippets that later becomes illegible, reports a Twitter poll and a larger survey where 57% use inline comments and about 40% say comments help remember code, shows real losses prevented by well-placed notes, and proposes treating comments as testable documentation to avoid rot and guide future contributors.
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chapters (14)
- 0:00Code comments purpose
- 1:57Why developers write comments
- 3:43Problems with comments
- 5:50Risks of outdated comments
- 8:24Poorly written comments
- 13:26Good programmer traits
- 14:52Comment best practices debate
- 17:23Toxic culture around comments
- 20:40Comments for learning
- 23:59Fast coding bad comments
- 25:29Commenting habits survey
- 29:52Comments as documentation
- 31:44New programmers support
- 34:39Q&A
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