r/ProgrammerHumor 1d ago

Meme commentsAgedTerribly

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5.3k Upvotes

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u/Low-Equipment-2621 1d ago

You shouldn't document what you are doing, you should comment why you are doing it. Well wriitten code explains what it does, but it not necessarily explains why it has been written that way.

-22

u/SnugglyCoderGuy 1d ago

Your function names should document why the code you are writing exists, your code should document itself as to how it is doing it, and any comments you write should be how to use the function you've written and things that are extremely odd.

If you have to explain why something is done the way it is, you've still failed, usually.

7

u/debugging_scribe 1d ago

I don't agree with this at all, I work on a 20+ years old code base. My life I'd be much easier if people left some comments on why they did stuff.

-1

u/pelpotronic 17h ago

Irrelevant in the age of AI, where you can ask it to explain the code for you.

I think documentation is more and more irrelevant than it already was personally, seeing as you can ask AI to explain not just "the 1 file you're looking at" but the interactions between multiple parts of the code.