The code shows what happens. But comments should explain why it was done this way.
Sometimes the code started simple and readable, till you ran into a weird edge case a year ago. Now the code no longer looks as obvious and another developer might scratch their head when they read over it. A small comment can help out there quite a bit.
Or you’re doing something stupid in code not because you want to, but because management forced you to. So you put a comment there that the code isn’t wrong, management wanted that behavior.
The why can usually be found in Git and issue trackers. Just look at the history of the file to get some decent clue about why a piece of code was programmed in a certain way.
That works for newer projects, but on older projects there’s a dozen commits for any given line and a handful of Jira tickets that have something to do with it, but none that say “Change exactly this”. A comment why you made an interesting design decision costs a lot less time than trying to unwrap the commit history… Especially when you can’t even find a clue on why this was done as the commit might simply be “Implemented feature XY”
The code shows what happens. But comments should explain why it was done this way.
Sometimes the code started simple and readable, till you ran into a weird edge case a year ago. Now the code no longer looks as obvious and another developer might scratch their head when they read over it. A small comment can help out there quite a bit.
Or you’re doing something stupid in code not because you want to, but because management forced you to. So you put a comment there that the code isn’t wrong, management wanted that behavior.
The why can usually be found in Git and issue trackers. Just look at the history of the file to get some decent clue about why a piece of code was programmed in a certain way.
That works for newer projects, but on older projects there’s a dozen commits for any given line and a handful of Jira tickets that have something to do with it, but none that say “Change exactly this”. A comment why you made an interesting design decision costs a lot less time than trying to unwrap the commit history… Especially when you can’t even find a clue on why this was done as the commit might simply be “Implemented feature XY”