I’m Bill I don’t comment my code (except complex parts), instead I try to make code clear, including using proper variable and function names and try to keep functions short. I don’t think I ever got lost in my own code in my 20+ years of experience. Even got complements about it.
The programming language is meant for humans to read/write, if you need to put comments to understand your code then your code sucks.
When writing basic business code, structuring the code well and having good naming standards means you shouldn't need a ton of comments, but you should still have some. Plus, using structured function content blocks gives you intellisense in some languages and IDEs, which is important for code reuse in teams.
However, when I was doing scientific programming I'd have comments for almost every line at times where I put the mathematical formula and operations the line represents. Implementing a convolution neutral network with parameters to dynamically scale the layers or MPI stochastic simulations is much different than writing CRUD functions or basic business logic.
I’ve seen this same thing happen with Python’s type hints. Turns out giving an “escape hatch” type for devs who have no clue what the type actually is leads to a lot of useless type hints.
Yeah, it’s especially bad, when a library doesn’t provide type hints itself. It can be comically difficult to find out what the return type of a function is, because every if-else-branch might have a different return value, so you may need to read the function body in full to figure out what the type might be.
Add to that, that lots of the tooling around type hints isn’t as fleshed out / useful as it is in fully typed languages and I can definitely understand why someone might not immediately feel like it’s a valuable use of their time.
After so many years in this company, lots of the unmaintainable code I have to deal with is either my own fault, or the fault of someone I used to work with but and now they left and I’m the one who has to apologize for their code.
If I move to a different company, 100% of the unmaintainable code I’ll have to deal with there will be someone else’s fault.
And managers don’t like it when you explain that the code is a unmanageable mess because they put a deadline on every goddamn thing and never pay off technical debt.
At a new place you can honestly say “the code is kinda a mess, it needs a bunch of work” and the manager can just assume it was because the last guy didn’t know what he was doing and not because of their own shitty management.
Management could implement a code review process to avoid this.
Software development isn’t a brand new field anymore. Most problems are well known and therefore have well known solutions. So it pretty much always comes down to management not wanting to implement the known solutions to the problems because its easier to blame the devs.
No, no, first you need to reroute, to be able to patch it through, and THEN you can override the command sequence in order to exploit parallelisms at the core root interface.
Every time I commit I have to look through git diff, figure out what the hell I actually did, come up with something intelligent to say about jt, possibly split the commit into multiple commits if I changed multiple things, do some shuffling with git reset and git add…
For some reason all my personal projects are all like 4K SLoC with 50 total commits, all of which include apologies for not doing more smaller commits
Patch add - it shows you particular changes you made, and you choose whether or not to include them in the commit. (You can then use git stash -k to stash only the changes you did not add, so you can test before you commit.)
You see, sometimes I code something, go to bed before finishing it, come back, decide not to commit because then I’d have to think of a commit message and I just want to code, start working on an unrelated feature, do that for a couple days, get distracted by life stuff and put the project down for a few weeks/months, rinse and repeat, and then I finally get around to writing a commit message because I’m about to start a huge change and I want a restore point and I’m like. Okay, it’s been like 3 months since my last commit, I’m pretty sure my code can now do something it couldn’t 3 months ago but come on, I can’t even remember what I had for lunch last Thursday
I’m well aware this is terrible practice but I don’t know how to stop doing it
Commit more often. Maybe work in a different feature branch, and don’t be afraid to commit your half-working crappy code. If it’s a personal project/fork, it’s totally acceptable to commit often with bad commit names and small unfinished changes: you can always amend/squash the commits later. That’s how I tend to work: create a new branch, work on the feature, rebase and merge (fast forward, no merge commit). Also, maybe don’t jump around working on random features :P
You can help yourself a lot here by making commits every time you make a meaningful change. A feature doesn’t need to be complete to commit major checkpoints along the path to completion. That’s what feature branches are for. Commit often. It’ll help you think of messages, and it’ll help you recover in the case of catastrophe.
I just get too excited about actually implementing/fixing something (random things that I see along the way) more than commit ceremony (nobody will care about it in my project anyway other than one random guy who gave the repo a star)
I spend much time splitting them up inside visual studio by file and individual lines changed to try and separate my many simultaneous changes into several somewhat usable commits. If I was stupid enough to make some big refactor at the same time I might just have to throw in the towel… It’s really painful after a few weeks to try and pick up the pieces of what I was doing but never commited too lol.
I’m not sure why but i just flat out work better at night when everyone is asleep, pretty mutch all of the “last modified” time on my project files is from 10 pm to 3 am
no distractions…
one metaphor i heard is, holding a program in your head is like building a house of cards, every time a phone rings or something breaks your concentration, you have to rebuild the house
programmer_humor
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