Interesting to see your opinion on how commenting shouldn’t be mandatory. I specifically go the extra mile to ensure my code is readable for everyone, by naming my variables and functions to be as self-explanatory as possible and breaking down long expressions to store chunks in variables. This is why I was feeling confused as to what more I could add to explain my code better, though I must admit there are still considerable complex portions in some of my projects that would appreciate similar simplification.
Yes, I feel like some kind of bell should ring in your brain when something needs to be commented, most often if you struggled to write out the solution or you had to do a lot of digging from various places to achieve the final resulting piece of code, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to pressure yourself into thinking you should comment everything, because some knowledge has to be assumed, nowadays you could even add that if someone completely extraneous to the codebase entered without any knowledge, they could feed the parts of code they need to understand into some LLM to get a feel for what they’re looking at, with further feedback from actual devs though, you never know what random bs they might write.
Good one on the variables to store results of expressions, I agree with that method, though I always forget to do that because I get so lost in the pride of writing that convoluted one-liner that I think, “oh yeah, this is perfectly beautiful and understandable 😇”, I have to check myself more on that.
complex portions in some of my projects that would appreciate similar simplification
Interesting to see your opinion on how commenting shouldn’t be mandatory. I specifically go the extra mile to ensure my code is readable for everyone, by naming my variables and functions to be as self-explanatory as possible and breaking down long expressions to store chunks in variables. This is why I was feeling confused as to what more I could add to explain my code better, though I must admit there are still considerable complex portions in some of my projects that would appreciate similar simplification.
Yes, I feel like some kind of bell should ring in your brain when something needs to be commented, most often if you struggled to write out the solution or you had to do a lot of digging from various places to achieve the final resulting piece of code, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to pressure yourself into thinking you should comment everything, because some knowledge has to be assumed, nowadays you could even add that if someone completely extraneous to the codebase entered without any knowledge, they could feed the parts of code they need to understand into some LLM to get a feel for what they’re looking at, with further feedback from actual devs though, you never know what random bs they might write.
Good one on the variables to store results of expressions, I agree with that method, though I always forget to do that because I get so lost in the pride of writing that convoluted one-liner that I think, “oh yeah, this is perfectly beautiful and understandable 😇”, I have to check myself more on that.
So I’m not alone on that haha.
Sorry, what’s the subject of that?
This is unfortunate for new programmers cause I think it’s some kind of learned instinct rather than a hard rule
That’s true, I don’t know how it could be described as a hard rule though
I was just referring to my original question i.e. how I should comment in my code to explain its working if I have already done so in the code itself
oh, I get it now