[TeMPOraL]

I'd say it's mostly a meme. If a code review doesn't involve reviewing comments around the modified code, it's a bug in the process.

Elsewhere in this thread Ousterhout's book is mentioned; I like his advice about always placing comments in the most obvious places and as close to the code they affect as possible. This way, you can't miss them, and and it's hard to forget to update them.

[lozenge]

Everyone can have comment blindness to some extent, but I've worked with two people who auto-collapsed docstrings and didn't read and hence update comments, which is enough (one person writing code without updating comments/docstrings and one person inadequately reviewing). Sure, the problem only appears in a bit of the code, but it means people stop trusting all the comments.

[TeMPOraL]

> auto-collapsed docstrings

Woah, that sounds like a pretty dumb feature. Auto-collapsing whole functions is useful, but auto-collapsing docstrings sounds like a recipe for disaster. People write docstrings and inline comments for a reason.

[tigershark]

No. Autocollapsing doc strings is not dumb at all, it’s an amazing feature. Most of the time in my experience the doc strings are completely useless when you are writing code, they may be useful only for the caller because they give you info in the autocompletion (and most of the time is just “get this value” “set this value”) and they can be used to automatically generate api docs. If they are extensively used in a private project that no one will call from a different one I will auto collapse them. They take so much space for nothing and they slow me down terribly. And the projects in which I have seen this behaviour had horrible methods naming, clueless architecture and completely arbitrary method subdivision. The doc strings where just the wrong solution for the wrong problem.