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How much trust should you have in comments?

Over the course of 25 years slinging code, my answer is "less and less." I've been burned too many times by elaborate commentary that had little relation to the "truth" of what the system was really doing. Commentary rarely survives program growth and maintenance.

The commentary I tend to trust are "what does this do?" comments, if they're brief. The larger the comment, the less I tend to trust it. I also pay a lot of attention to "BUG", "FIXME", and "TBD" comments, though conceptually these are more like Post-It markers in the code.

POD is really something different. It's external documentation that's been entwined in the code.

In reply to Re: No Comment by dws
in thread No Comment by awkmonk

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