Hot take: Even these ‘useless’ comments help, since they relieve you of the burden of reading the code itself, even if it’s trivial. One line of English is easier to parse than one line of trivial code.
32Yep.
But reading one outdated line of English is worse than reading 5 lines of code and seeing the true picture.
16Or, if you're my manager, there's just one comment at the top that says "for pizza"
8I don’t feel like “ditch comments” is the right solution to “we {forget, don’t care enough} to update comments”.
2
Exactly! Maybe i've never seen a Pizza Box before. For you your code may be trivial. But for someone else an "open before eating" helps a lot.
3
Client: it doesn't work
Dev: did you open from the other side?
Client: now when I eat it, it tastes like box.
24Hello! I'm a hobbyist in this space (scripting/coding), does anyone here have a:
- gold standard of what commit messages should look like?
- common practice/etiquette for commit message?
I never had a team or guide or mentor and when I saw this i felt that my commits are like smoke signals describing that there's a fire. which isnt really helpful.
I tried to contribute to a python module that I use daily, my PR was so over engineered (iirc i added just 3 lines, but with tests, screenshots, CI/CD) i think to compensate for my lack of experience that I got called out ("wow this is pretty extreme just for that feature").
9We’re lucky in that the inventors of our technology are still alive (for the most part). So we can ask them: Linus Torvalds on git commit messages
12This is really cool
2
The gold standard, as so often, is to consult an oracle able to tell you what questions you will be asking when looking at the comment or commit in the future. Then answer those questions and write them down.
In lieu of an oracle, use your experience and best judgement.
Oh and never write whole papers to explain what you're doing, unless you're actually writing a whole paper. Instead, drop a cheeky
doi;//URI as the only comment of the whole file to document that you're an experienced enough programmer to copy from papers instead of stack overflow.3My personal cent: Some tools strongly suggest that your commit messages should not exceed 50 characters in the first line, and 80 characters on every other line. While the 80-character rule makes sense if you’re using a terminal (and someone on your team will even if you don’t), I strongly disagree with the 50-character rule. If you want to be in any way clear what you did, 50 characters is simply not enough even for the subject line.
0The reason for the approximately 50 character limit is because there's many tools that display a single line and will truncate it if it's more than about that length (though really the point of truncation can vary wildly -- plenty of tools will let you go twice that before they cut you off). So if your one line summary is too long, it'll be cut off and harder to understand your commit at a glance.
You always can elaborate in a second paragraph, at any rate.
4
Sounds helpful. I usually eat the pizza with the cardboard box
4Fiber. Yum.
5Also the crunch 🤌🏻
2
And I still end up doing it wrong
4Do you prefer your pizzas with or without the peel?
3Instructions unclear, got the kernel compilation stuck in pizza
3But the box is the best part!
2Instructions unclear, got dick stuck in a box
2He he he.
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