Again, the above is more about being funny than being helpful. But you SHOULD leave a comment warning others not to pursue some seemingly obvious “better solution,” if you’ve already tried and rejected it. And when you do, the comment should specify what solution you tried and why you decided against it. In those cases, it’s best to save everyone the time and embarrassment and leave a comment. Do you really want to be the one responsible for robbing all future coders of the joy of reading that clever little rhyme?

When another developer reading your code would need a helping hand to know why you’ve solved the problem this way, or what dependency made a certain approach necessary, then add a comment. Don’t get me wrong, there are times — especially when you are slogging through a crushing workload — where injecting a bit of humor can be good for the soul. But when you write a funny comment to make up for bad code, it actually makes people The Top 5 Most Common UX Mistakes Web Designers Make less likely to refactor and fix the code later. The downside of these kinds of comments is that they can make your code very “noisy” and harder to read for anyone who is actively involved in maintaining it. The good news is that most code editors support “code folding” which allows us to collapse the comments so we can focus on the code. Sometimes the obvious solution to a problem doesn’t actually solve the problem.

Do you want to become a versatile and skilled graphic designer? This is a comprehensive article on the best graphic design certification courses. Upwork Profile Example In 2021 Free Sample For Beginners I make Coding & Tech easy and fun with well-thought how-to guides and reviews. Instead of splitting the email by the character “@”, “” is used.

This depends on the license of the code in question. If the license orders you to add a legal note, you must do so. Sometimes a piece of code might seem useless or out-of-place. The natural reaction to this is to remove the piece of code.

The title is the folder that contains the program, why repeat it everywhere? Your version control system will tell you that… As someone who wasn’t involved with your project, I can read that code and understand what is going on very quickly. That’s a sign of good code as far as I am concerned.

Additionally, the end user is likely never going to get into your source code, so the comment would only be seen by other developers . Multi-line block comments are opened with ‘#[‘ and closed with ‘]#’. Sometimes source code contains a novel or noteworthy solution to a specific problem. In such cases, comments may contain an explanation of the methodology. Such explanations may include diagrams and formal mathematical proofs.

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The further removed from the source code your API documentation is, the more likely it is to become outdated or inaccurate over time. A good strategy to mitigate this is to embed the documentation directly into the code and then use a tool to extract it. //This function looks like it was written by a third grader. I don’t want
//to fix it because I want you all to see how bad it is. Or maybe they do fix the code, but include the code, simply commented out, so that they can show off their code, while at the same time mocking the previous author.

Add enough of them and you can end up doubling the amount of stuff future maintainers of your code have to read. There are also times when you come across a comment that is redundant. If the code is already simple and obvious, there’s no need to add a comment. WordPress runs on PHP, a programming language used to process the data needed to display your website to the world. Although PHP is rarely seen by the everyday user, it remains crucial to the life of your WordPress site. Keeping your PHP version updated ensures your site is running securely and…

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The tool will also surface TODOs in PRs, where you can turn them into issues. They are great for temporarily dumping thoughts so you can focus on what you’re doing. TODOs are definitely better than having a list on the side, because they have context. Please see the individual “set” scripts for more extensive information about each of the different variables.

• Go and read any popular library’s source code to see their significance.
• The Ada programming language uses ‘–‘ to indicate a comment up to the end of the line.
• You may come across people that consider comments as an afterthought or tell you “comments aren’t important,” ignore them.
• We not only gave the warning to future devs, but included a placeholder comment in the middle of a function.
• Even a few hours later, the code that made perfect sense to you back then could be a complete mystery now.

They are added with the purpose of making the source code easier for humans to understand, and are generally ignored by compilers and interpreters. The syntax of comments in various programming languages varies considerably. Programming tools sometimes store documentation and metadata in comments.

An Engineer’s Guide to TODOs: How to Get Things Done

They can work out what’s going to happen when the code runs. Little notes back and forth from all the different maintainers of a project can often get cluttered. You spend more time reading the comments than you do Who Are Bitcoin Cores Developers? Alexandria the actual code. And often, you could have understood how the program works without the comments altogether. Hi, good post, i however personnaly dislike inline comment and rather like the multi lines comments.

In 20+ years of writing code for a living, this is the one phrase I’ve heard the most. Thanks for sharing about how to comment your code. The real use of commenting out code is for you to keep that code handy while trying something else.

When Header Comments Are Useful

Howwouldyouliketoreadabookiftherewerenospacesbetweenwords? Soeverytimeyouwritecodewithoutproperspacing,rememberthissentence. The main difference with these commands is that they each only have a single purpose. So, if you keep executing (CTRL + K + C), the comments will keep piling up, as shown in the screenshot below. This quick guide will teach you the VSCode comment shortcut and everything else you need to know about commenting in VS Code, including multi-line comments. I recommend very rarely using comments at all, but instead focus on making your code so readable that it doesn’t require them.

Do you want to create apps with an outstanding design? Are you looking to become a professional Python developer? Or are you interested in programming but don’t know where to start? As you can see, there are a bunch of comments in this piece of code. When you use open-source libraries, you might need to add a legal note at the top of the file. A common misuse of a code comment is to add information that should live in the code.

Even if you write great code, there’s a chance for confusion and ambiguity. We’ll discuss some of the different kinds of comments that you will run across, their uses, and best practices when using them yourself. Small Business OwnersSmall Business Owners Divi makes it easy for anyone to build their own website. Comments in PHP can be either in C++ style , or use hashes. PHPDoc is a style adapted from Javadoc and is a common standard for documenting PHP code.

Especially as a beginner, you may have a bad habit of marking areas of code with comments. This is one of the countless benefits of version control. You can travel back in time to inspect and revive old pieces of the code if needed. Also, chances are the to-do is accidentally left hanging in the codebase.

If you miss something that ought to be commented, you can trust your reviewer to point it out. I attempt to make the code clean enough to read without too many comments. My goal is to make coding and tech easier for you with comprehensive guides and reviews.