this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2024
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If those functions are huge units of work or pretty complex, I can agree. For most cases though, a simple code comment should do to explain what's going on?
Comments should never be about what is being done. They should only ever be about why it is being done.
If you write your code like suggested in the book, you won't need to rely on possibly outdated comments to tell you what's going on.
Any comment about "what is being done" can be replaced with extracting the code in question to a separate, well-named method.
I disagree about comments should never be about what is being done. If what is being done is not obvious then they're important. Take assembly code as an example. Or complicated bit operations. I agree the why is more important to document than the what but saying the what is never important seems misguided.
Also, this may be a semantics thing, but oftentimes the code's specification is in doc comments. I don't believe you're claiming code shouldn't ever have specifications, this isn't meant as a gotcha lol.
You're talking about assembly in a thread about OOP...
I think commenting what can be important in OOP too though.