> Understood as senior: Communication skills matter most.
The reason people dismiss comments is usually that they or others around them aren't good at writing useful comments.
Especially when there are linter rules requiring comments you'll have something like def open_thing(x, y): and a comment, "defines a function that opens thing."
Yes, those are pointless. Often what's going on is a person is dumping their stream of consciousness into the comment field.
It takes practice to understand what a reader needs to know. You have to actually practice reading comments and thinking things through (another reason code review is important in your team) to get good at undertanding what you should write down.
All that said, if you truly hate commenting, at least build a habit of descriptive naming and exploiting your type system as fully as possible.
I'm actually thinking more of social skills and written language, not programming. I said something about this in a different thread earlier this week, and someone was baffled as to why I thought being able to write and sell was important, since you just wind up doing what your boss tells you to do anyway.
As opposed to telling the boss what you're going to do.
> Especially when there are linter rules requiring comments you'll have something like def open_thing(x, y): and a comment, "defines a function that opens thing."
I actually think those comments are useful in two ways:
1. The process of writing a comment will help often help me rename the function/variables so e.g. “defines a function that opens thing” becomes something like “opens can_of_worms with the given instrument and restraints” for the method definition open_can_of_worms(instrument, restraints)
2. You can use variable/return value comments to further restrict the domain of values, e.g. non-null, positive or in the range 1-42 (arguably it would be better to express some of these in the type system, but that is a different discussion). These comments show up in my IDE when I try to call the code in a remote location, so I don’t have to guess or remember the constraints.
> Understood as senior: Communication skills matter most.
The reason people dismiss comments is usually that they or others around them aren't good at writing useful comments.
Especially when there are linter rules requiring comments you'll have something like def open_thing(x, y): and a comment, "defines a function that opens thing."
Yes, those are pointless. Often what's going on is a person is dumping their stream of consciousness into the comment field.
It takes practice to understand what a reader needs to know. You have to actually practice reading comments and thinking things through (another reason code review is important in your team) to get good at undertanding what you should write down.
All that said, if you truly hate commenting, at least build a habit of descriptive naming and exploiting your type system as fully as possible.