March 13, 2015 at 2:37 am
Phil Parkin (3/13/2015)
Superfluous comments are worse than no comments. You know the type:
--Find the average
select @avg = avg(x)
Reminds me of those people who, when doing presentations, just recite what is written on screen.
+1
+1 to no comments too.
Worse one I've come across "If you need comments to understand this - you shouldn't be looking"
-------------------------------Posting Data Etiquette - Jeff Moden [/url]Smart way to ask a question
There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand (the world). There is no such thing as a dumb question. ― Carl Sagan
I would never join a club that would allow me as a member - Groucho Marx
March 13, 2015 at 2:42 am
The worst commenting, not comment, ever was when i found my stored procedure is not working for some reason:
CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.Procedure
AS
---BEGIN
---The whole procedure code commented
---END
Not sure if it counts as the worst comment but...
March 13, 2015 at 2:45 am
Gary Varga (3/13/2015)
Toby Harman (3/13/2015)
Many years ago I found a comment by my boss in the code which read something along the lines of
-- Don't touch this code
-- It does fancy statistical maths on an iterative loop until it gets the answer
-- Really, don't touch it
-- Even if you think you kn ow what you are doing, DON'T
It served one useful purpose. It warned me that the next page was complex. It didn't tell me anything about what it was actually doing!
Sometimes quotes say a lot more about the author than the reader.
Take it that you meant "more about the author than the code", the other is really really spooky
😎
March 13, 2015 at 2:46 am
Stuart Davies (3/13/2015)
Worse one I've come across "If you need comments to understand this - you shouldn't be looking"
+1 :hehe:
March 13, 2015 at 2:49 am
Stuart Davies (3/13/2015)
Phil Parkin (3/13/2015)
Superfluous comments are worse than no comments. You know the type:
--Find the average
select @avg = avg(x)
Reminds me of those people who, when doing presentations, just recite what is written on screen.
+1
+1 to no comments too.
Worse one I've come across "If you need comments to understand this - you shouldn't be looking"
Yes!!! Commented out code. That's what source code control is for. If you need to leave a reference to old code then just leave a comment WHY it was removed with a date. Commented out code alone just says "this is code we are not using". I don't care unless I know WHY and even then I don't want a third of the code to be that which is deemed no longer relevant!!!
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
March 13, 2015 at 2:51 am
Eirikur Eiriksson (3/13/2015)
Gary Varga (3/13/2015)
Toby Harman (3/13/2015)
Many years ago I found a comment by my boss in the code which read something along the lines of
-- Don't touch this code
-- It does fancy statistical maths on an iterative loop until it gets the answer
-- Really, don't touch it
-- Even if you think you kn ow what you are doing, DON'T
It served one useful purpose. It warned me that the next page was complex. It didn't tell me anything about what it was actually doing!
Sometimes quotes say a lot more about the author than the reader.
Take it that you meant "more about the author than the code", the other is really really spooky
😎
No. Not at all. The author assumes that the reader will not understand the code. To me it suggests that the author doesn't. Otherwise it would be clearly commented and readable. Even if very complicated and difficult to understand.
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
March 13, 2015 at 2:58 am
Gary Varga (3/13/2015)
Yes!!! Commented out code. That's what source code control is for. If you need to leave a reference to old code then just leave a comment WHY it was removed with a date. Commented out code alone just says "this is code we are not using". I don't care unless I know WHY and even then I don't want a third of the code to be that which is deemed no longer relevant!!!
I think commented-out code says this:
"I may have removed code which is still required – I'm just not sure. But if I leave it here, I lessen the problem, because it will be very easy for some other developer, who actually knows what they are doing, to resurrect. I don't really understand source control."
😀
The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence
- Martin Rees
The absence of consumable DDL, sample data and desired results is, however, evidence of the absence of my response
- Phil Parkin
March 13, 2015 at 3:03 am
Going off on a slight tangent, what about bad error messages?
I've just had this one in SSIS:
Executing the query "exec ..." failed with the following error: "Package execution failed with status: Failed
Thanks for that.
The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence
- Martin Rees
The absence of consumable DDL, sample data and desired results is, however, evidence of the absence of my response
- Phil Parkin
March 13, 2015 at 3:09 am
Phil Parkin (3/13/2015)
Going off on a slight tangent, what about bad error messages?I've just had this one in SSIS:
Executing the query "exec ..." failed with the following error: "Package execution failed with status: Failed
Thanks for that.
My favourites (sic) are the ones that say something akin to "Error: No error detected". Was there a problem? Wasn't there a problem? I am left unsure.
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
March 13, 2015 at 3:26 am
dwain.c (3/12/2015)
MLK44 (3/12/2015)
.+1. What's worse: bad comments or no comments?
In general I would say definitely bad comments - they can confuse or obscure what is going on. Typically when you encounter a sloppy hack and slash coder's work you'll find comments attributable to other methods from which the code was hacked, and which have not been edited to be sensible. This requires extra, pointless time to parse and discard. Comments need to be maintained to be of any use.
There are plenty of times when no comments are needed or useful, with appropriate naming and structure. I'll always tend to favour sparser commenting - to communicate intent - with good structure in my coding style.
March 13, 2015 at 3:55 am
My favorite, found in a long stored procedure:
------------- CAREFUL -------------
March 13, 2015 at 4:18 am
My favourite bad comment is
"recreated it by using more functions instead of joins"
Followed by a nest of scalar functions and while loops. It happens to be one of the worst offenders for timeouts in our application. I've had a stab at speeding it up, but at almost 800 lines I just get lost in it.
I suppose the comment itself isn't so bad, it does describe the problem - just what it represents!
March 13, 2015 at 4:43 am
I remember seeing the comment "What has she done now?". Unfortunately, apart from the discourtesy, the author had not checked how his code rendered - it appeared in an email to tens of thousands of his organisation's customers
March 13, 2015 at 4:43 am
Reference comments are highly appreciated. If someone take the time to tell me where to look up a request that prompted the code it saves me a bunch of time searching for and guessing for the relevant issue.
In general I find any comment instructive because of all the places the person didn't decide to put in comments.
March 13, 2015 at 5:15 am
Stuart Davies (3/13/2015)
Worse one I've come across "If you need comments to understand this - you shouldn't be looking"
Guilty....
Here's an extract from some system documentation I wrote a few years ago:
Now, it handles the load date in a similar way as described in the previous paragraph but it does it all in some sub queries – I have spent a good few minutes staring at these sub queries and I'm not 100% sure I can work out exactly how I did it now. Maybe if it wasn't after 4PM and I wasn't flagging from all the caffeine I had earlier on I'd be able to write something sensible here about it. You're a programmer. You work it out.
Fortunately this relates to code that only had to run for 1 year and is therefore no longer in production use...
Ben
^ Thats me!
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