Another reason to avoid writing comments
Written on 12 Dec 2003
I’ve been converting my soon-to-be-ex (1) team to the XP approach to comments (i.e. don’t, fix the code instead). We had a problem that really had to have a line of comment to explain it (some hackery to stop Visual Studio complaining). Peter Clary noticed that when there are very few comments, the ones you do have really stand out and attract your attention. Kinda obvious, really, but it’s nice to have the reinforcement.
(1) Last day in Thomson Financial on Monday, joining Thoughtworks next year.
P.S. My first post! Finally got around to it…
Filed in: Agile Programming.