Programmer Humor

answer: the answer

I actually agree that "good enough" code can be self-documenting, but it isn't always enough to achieve my goal which is to make the code understandable to my audience with minimal effort. With that goal in mind, I write my code as I would write a technical document. Consider the audience, linear prose, logical order, carefully selected words, things like that... In general, I treat comments as a sort of footnote, to provide additional context where helpful.

There are limits to self-documenting code, and interfaces are a good example. With interfaces, I use comments liberally because so many of the important details about the implementation are not obvious from the code: exactly how the implementation should behave, expected inputs and outputs under different scenarios, assumptions, semantic meaning, etc. Without this information, an implementation cannot be tested or verified.

What they mean is that the variable names and function names are documentation.

For example changing "for( i in getList() )" to "for( patient in getTodaysAppointments() )" is giving the reader more information that might negate the need for a comment.

I follow these simple rules and encourage my colleagues to do so

1. If I'm just shuffling jsons, then yes, the code should be self documented. If it's not, the code should be rewritten.

2. If I implement some complex logic or algorithm, then the documentation should be written both to tests and in the code. Tests should be as dull as possible.

3. If I write multithreading, the start, interruption, end, and shared variables should be clearly indicated by all means that I have: comment, documentation, code clearness. Tests should be repeated and waits should not be over 50ms.

Good code is self documenting as in you don't need to describe what it is doing and it is clear to read. Whoever says that and isn't just repeating what they heard understands that whenever you are doing something not explicit in the code it should be on a comment.

Workarounds and explaining you need to use this structure instead of another for some reason are clear examples, but business hints are another useful comment. Or sectioning the process (though I prefer descriptive private functions or pragma regions for that).

It also addresses the hint that the code should be readable because you're not going to have comments to explain spaghetti. Just a hint, doesn't prevent it. Others also said it, comments are easier to get outdated as you don't have the compiler to assist. And outdated comments lead to confusion.

Code is the what. Comments are the why.

Few things worse than an out of date comment.

In my opinion, it strongly depends on what you're coding.

Low-level code where you need to initialize array indices to represent certain flags? ~~Absolutely comment the living shit out of that.~~ → See response.
High-level code where you're just plumbing different libraries? Hell no, the code is just as easily readable as a comment.

I do also think that, no matter where you lie in this spectrum, there is always merit to improving code to reduce the need for documentation:

• Rather than typing out the specification, write a unit/integration test.
• Rather than describing that a function should only be called in a certain way, make it impossible to do it wrongly by modelling this in your type system.
• Rather than adding a comment to describe what a block of code does, pull it out into a separate function.
• Rather than explaining how a snippet of code works, try to simplify it, so this becomes obvious.

The thing with documentation is that it merely makes it easier to learn about complexity, whereas a code improvement may eliminate this complexity or the need to know about it, because the compiler/test will remember.

This does not mean you should avoid comments like they're actively bad. As many others said, particularly the "why" is not expressable in code. Sometimes, it is also genuinely not possible to clean up a snippet of code enough that it becomes digestable.
But it is still a good idea, when you feel the need to leave a comment that explains something else than the "why", to consider for a moment, if there's not some code improvement you should be doing instead.

Comment should describe "why?", not "how?", or "what?", and only when the "why?" is not intuitive.

The problem with comments arise when you update the code but not the comments. This leads to incorrect comments, which might do more harm than no comments at all.

E.g. Good comment: "This workaround is due to a bug in xyz"

Bad comment: "Set variable x to value y"

Note: this only concerns code comments, docstrings are still a good idea, as long as they are maintained

What a function does should be self evident. Why it does it might not be.

Code is not self documenting when decision trees are created based on some methodology that's not extremely obvious

Document intentions and decisions, not code.

Its definitely a balance. Good code shouldn't need much commenting, but sometimes you have to do something for a reason that isn't immediately obvious and that's when comments are most useful. If you're just explaining what a snippet does instead of why you're doing it that way, there's probably more work to be done.

Code should always by itself document the "how" of the code, otherwise the code most likely isn't good enough. Something the code can never do is explain the "why" of the code, something that a lot of programmers skip. If you ever find yourself explaining the "how" in the comments, maybe run through the code once more and see if something can be simplified or variables can get more descriptive names.

For me, that's what was originally meant with self-documenting code. A shame lazy programmers hijacked the term in order to avoid writing any documentation.

I absolutely agree, and I too hate this stupid idea of "good code documenting itself" and "comments being unnecessary".
I have a theory where this comes from. It was probably some manager, who has never written a single line of code, who thought that comments were a waste of time, and employees should instead focus on writing code. By telling them that "good code documents itself", they could also just put the blame on their employees.
"Either you don't need comments or your code sucks because it's not self-documenting"
Managers are dumb, and they will never realize that spending a bit of time on writing useful comments may later actually save countless hours, when the project is taken over by a different team, or the people who initially created it, don't work at the company anymore.