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by lilfrost 728 days ago
There is consensus documenting why you did something is good (which is what root comment is talking about). Documenting what you did is commonly thought to be a crutch for writing unreadable code.
2 comments

I hate the second thought, because not documenting is clearly not stopping people from committing the unreadable code. Instead we get "my code is self-documenting, I'm not going to write documentation".

And as for the third opinion of "the documentation becomes out of date when the code changes", I would prefer slightly incorrect comments to decipher code rather than no comments to decipher code. Doubly so because I can compare the comments to historical revisions.

While I _absolutely_ agree with those sentiments, I have seen nothing like consensus on them myself (in mostly tech startups, but also fintech, and financial (yes, those are different things)). If I limit it to programmers I respect, the percentages go up, but to _maybe_ 75% tops.