Architecture & DesignIn Praise of the Lowly Comment

In Praise of the Lowly Comment

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The compiler removes them completely. The computer ignores them. Some
developers think we should do away with them entirely. But in the grand
scheme of software development, I personally think they have a very
important part to play. What are they? Comments, of course. Now, that’s
not to say that all comments are created equal, or that you should just
sprinkle your code with comments without thinking about what you’re doing.
But in my experience, good developers recognize that comments are a useful
tool, and employ them to make code more clear and maintainable. With some
practice, you can do the same.

Dysfunctional Comments

Let’s sneak up on the notion of good comments by considering the other
kind first. There are some comments that I think you can (and should)
safely eradicate from your code. These include:

  • The tracking comment, listing who modified the code, when they did
    it, what they had for breakfast, and so on, in some sort of carefully
    formatted block (generally with a border made up of asterisks). You have a
    source code control system, right? Let it keep track of this sort of thing
    and don’t bother repeating it in the source code.
  • The “what” comment, repeating the code itself in English. You’ve
    probably seen code where every line had a comment, and i++
    was painfully annotated with “increment the counter variable.” You should
    presume that anyone reading your code understands the syntax and leave
    these comments out, unless you’re actually writing a tutorial for
    beginning developers.
  • The long explanatory comment far removed from the code it is
    purportedly explaining. I have seen developers stick entire readme files
    into comments, discussing the overall architecture and logic of their
    application. The problem is that the architecture and logic gets revised
    and the comment doesn’t, and out of sync explanations are worse than no
    explanation at all. This sort of overview belongs in external
    documentation, where it has some hope of being maintained.

In general, if a comment isn’t going to bring lasting value to the code –
leave it out.

Why Not Leave Them All Out?

Some developers look at the problem of comments going out of sync with the
code and see an insurmountable issue. Others (and these tend to be among
the best and brightest developers) proudly boast that they write
“self-documenting code.” In either case, their prescription is the same:
code with no comments at all.

While the notion of self-documenting code is seductive, in the end, I just
don’t believe it. Clarity in code is worth striving for, but as I’ve said
elsewhere, this software stuff is hard. No matter how crisp your
naming conventions, no matter how perfect your choice of implementation
language, no matter how much effort you put into refactoring, there is
going to come a time when you need to do something clever in your code to
meet a business need. And the more clever the code, the less
self-documenting it will be. If you leave it undocumented, you risk a
maintenance nightmare when you go back in six months to make an
improvement and can’t quite remember what you were doing in the first
place.

White Hat Comments

So if code needs comments, but not all comments are good, how do you write
good comments? In general, there are at least four kinds of comments that
I think are worthwhile in most source code:

  • Placeholder comments
  • Summary comments
  • Intent comments
  • Rocket Science comments

The Placeholder Comment: A String Around Your Virtual Finger

Some commands exist mainly to remind the developer to do something (or
not to do something). By convention, most of us tend to introduce these
with a single word in all caps: TODO, BUG, POSTPONE, HACK, UNDONE, and so
on. Such comments act as little bookmarks in the code, preventing the need
to cover your monitor with sticky notes as you have work in progress.

Placeholder comments are most useful when you’re working with an IDE that
will collect them automatically for you into a virtual to-do list (as most
of them will these days). If you sprinkle your code with TODO labels as
things occur to you, and you have a window open showing all the TODO lines
in the code, you may be able to get by with relatively little process for
tracking bugs and features (though your manager might complain about this
theory). Such comments should generally be short; if there’s a bug that
takes a paragraph to explain, it belongs in a more formal bug-tracking
system.

If there’s any chance of your source code being publicly released (or even
privately released to selected customers), you should do a careful review
of placeholder comments to make sure that you’re not shipping something
that will embarrass you. You can take a look at Google Code search to find
people who didn’t follow this rule of thumb.

The Summary Comment: Compensating for Tiny Brains

I’m not a fan of explaining every line of code with a line of comment that
says exactly the same thing. But summary comments, that explain an entire
block of code at one time, are a somewhat different animal. Rather than
explain ten lines of code individually, a summary comment might say
something like “Sort the customer list by age of oldest invoice and
display” or “Now center the uploaded graphic on a white rectangle that
fills the target area.”

Most likely, there isn’t any single line of code in these blocks that
would be difficult to understand on its own. But by summarizing the
code, you can make it easier to understand the overall flow of the
application. Given the choice between reading 100 lines of code or ten
lines of summary comments, the latter can be much more efficient.
Depending on your IDE, you can make the process even easier by coloring
the comments so that they stand out visually.

To a certain extent, good coding practices can obviate the need for
summary comments. If you keep methods very short and use descriptive names
for the methods themselves, then the naming can become the comments. But
the more procedural the code gets, the more likely you are to find that
some sort of summary commenting can serve as a useful road map to what’s
going on.

Intent Comments: Why is This Code Here?

With intent comments, instead of explaining how code works or what it
does, you explain why it’s there in the first place. A typical intent
comment is longer than a summary comment, and applies to a larger section
of code – an entire object, or a substantial piece of procedural code. You
might explain in an intent comment, for example, that the
EnahncedTableAdapter class is necessary because the standard TableAdapter
doesn’t include transactions or interface with your company’s custom
configuration classes.

Intent comments can be very difficult to write, because they force you to
actually think about what you’re saying; they’re not a mechanical
process. If you have a good functional spec for your application, you
may be able to reuse some of it for these comments. In any case,
they’re worth the effort, because they pay off when it becomes time
for maintenance programming. Intent comments can help you very quickly
come back up to speed on code that you haven’t touched for a while (or
that someone else wrote) and easily locate a section that you need to
work on.

Rocket Science Comments: Sometimes it is.

Finally, you will occasionally hear writing code dismissed as “well, it
isn’t rocket science.” The problem is that sometimes, in fact, it
is rocket science (or pick the metaphor of your choice for
difficult intellectual pursuits). Multi-threading, database
transactions, optimization algorithms, fancy graphics
processing…there are plenty of things that you can do in code that
won’t be immediately obvious to the average developer, even if they
understand the basic syntax of the language that you’re using.

In such cases, you need to write comments to explain the tricky code.
You’ll find many people to tell you that having code this tricky is a bad
thing, and that the right answer is to rewrite the code until it’s not
tricky. But sometimes, your code will be as simple, as direct, and as
clear as it can be – and it will still be tricky, just because of the
nature of the problem. In those cases, you can’t assume that every future
reader of the source code will be as brilliant as you are today. (Future
readers, of course, include you three weeks from now). The simple fact is
that such sections of code need comments.

Rocket science comments might be summary comments or intent comments, but
they need to be written with particular care. It doesn’t help if the
comments are just as difficult to understand as the code itself. You need
to strive for a tutorial voice that explains any difficult concepts,
possibly with further reference material. At times, you may find that such
comments are longer than the code they apply to. That’s fine; writing a
long comment now is better than wasting hours six months from now trying
to decipher your brilliant code.

It’s All a Matter of Discipline

Why do developers write bad comments, or spend so much energy trying to
justify a “no comments” policy? I think it’s because writing good comments
is hard, and maintaining them (so that the comments continue to reflect
the actual state of the code) is hard too. But trying to avoid
development work by skimping on comments is like trying to avoid
housework by skimping on the daily cleanup chores. Over the long run,
you’ll be much better off if you develop the discipline to write
crisp, clear, useful comments in your source code – comments that will
actually help you and other developers make sense of the code when
it’s time to work on it again. In this business, anything you can do
to help yourself out in understanding complexity is worth the effort.

About the Author

Mike Gunderloy is the Senior Technology Partner for Adaptive Strategy, a
Washington State consulting firm. You can read more of
Mike’s work at his Larkware Web site, or
contact him at MikeG1@larkfarm.com.

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