Dumb Comments
13 February 2025
Programming teachers are constantly pushing students to write comments. And then they are inevitably irritated when the students write comments like this:
for (var i = 0; i < 10; i++) { // Count from 0 to 9 using 'i'.
if (i == 5) { // Check if 'i' is 5.
break; // Exit from the loop early.
} // End of if statement.
} // End of counting loop.
This inevitably leads to a lecture about how comments should be written at a higher level, they serve no purpose if they are just describing the line. Eventually, with experience, programmers start writing useful comments.
So imagine my surprise when I suddenly found myself writing this exact style of low-level comments. After being a professional programmer for 35 years, I suddenly fell back into the commenting style of a high school student. Was I having a stroke? No, it was more interesting.
LOOP CCS RAND6 # Branch on the value of RAND6. TCF STEP # RAND6 > 0 (A = RAND6-1), jump to STEP CAF FIVE # RAND6 = 0, make it 5 again STEP TS RAND6 # Save decremented number back to RAND6 TCF LOOP # Loop again
In this case 'CCS', 'TCF', 'CAF', and 'TS' didn't initially mean much to me. So each line needed a comment to state what it is doing. However, over time these operators started becoming understandable words that I could read natively. At which point the comments started to thin out and become higher level.
We talk about 'coding', but sometimes we forget that 'code' is actually a 'code'. With experience it stops being 'code' and starts being a 'language'. But to a new programmer 'i++' needs an explicit explanation.
(So ... who recognizes that language?)
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