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this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2025
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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noticed someone like "comments are lazy! never use them! write better code!"
A:
I once had someone tell me to my face that comments were a code smell.
Depends on how they are used. They are extremely useful when they add context that is otherwise not present in the code, but way too often I see people simply restating what the code does in the comment. That's not very useful and can become confusing if the code later gets updated without updating the associated comment.
this seems counterintuitive but... comments are the best, name of the function but longer are the worst. Plain text summary of a huge chunk of code that I really should have taken the time to break up instead of writing a novella about it are somewhere in the middle.
I feel a lot of bad comment practices are downstream of javascript relying on jsdoc to act like a real language.
I've found that people who talk about "code smell" generally should not be listened to as it's entirely vibes-based-on-the-last-medium-post-i-read-this-morning. I had a dipshit manager tell me that he didn't like my use of decorators (in python mind you) because it was a "code smell" and recommended I read "clean" code, and I immediately threw every other opinion he had in the trash.
Managers gonna manage, but having a term for bad code that works that is more palatable than 'amateur hour' isn't inherently bad imo.
Worst i've heard is some company forbidding LINQ in C#, which in python terms is forcing you to always use for-loops in place of filter/map/reduce and comprehensions and other stuff like pandas.groupby
that's truly assenine as LINQ is supposed to be one of the few reasons to want to use C#