

Seven Ineffective Coding Habits of Many Programmers [video] - sidcool
https://vimeo.com/97329157

======
collyw
I find the "no/less comments" always seems to come from Java programmers. In
Perl / Python you can easily do the equivalent of a screen full of Java code
in a couple of lines. In these cases I think it is helpful to comment
liberally and explain what a list comprehension, or map is doing.

Comments adding signal to noise? I agreed with him on that point, but thinking
back, I find the most useful time to have comments is when looking at someone
elses unspecced code for the first time.

    
    
        # open file 
        file = open('filename' 'rw))
    
        # seek to bit 8
        file.seek(8)
    

This is pretty close to a real world example I had to fix.

Now The comments should have explained what we expect to see in the file. What
happens at byte 8? I still have no clue, and fixing the bug in that code took
me nearer to a week than the day it should have done.

