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by mostlylurks
1071 days ago
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Self-documenting code is perfectly capable of expressing the "why" in addition to the "what". It's just that often the extra effort and/or complexity required to express the "why" through code is not worth it when a simple comment would suffice. |
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I don't think anymore that's true, at least in a number of areas.
In another life, I've worked on concurrent data structures in java and/or lock-free java code I'd at this point call too arcane to ever write. The code ended up looking deceptively simple and it was the correct, minimal set of code to write. I don't see any way to express the correctness reasoning for these parts of code in code.
And now I'm dealing with configuration management. Code managing applications and systems. Some of these applications just resist any obvious or intuitive approach, and some others exhibit destructive or catastrophic behavior if approached with an intuitive approach. Again, how to do this in code? The working code is the smallest, most robust set of code I can setup to work around the madness. But why this is the least horrible way to approach this, I cannot express that in code. I can express this in comments.