Oh, I am SO Guilty of This…
I just saw this on twitter:
A common fallacy is to assume authors of incomprehensible code will somehow be able to express themselves lucidly and clearly in comments.
— Kevlin Henney (@KevlinHenney) September 20, 2013
…and for the first time in weeks it made me want to post something.
I'm so horribly guilty of this that I don't even realize it. When I look at poorly documented code, I think the author was just lazy - because he's as smart as I am - right? Maybe not.
In fact, probably not.
To this day I don't see myself as any smarter than a lot of the professional developers I have worked with. Sure, there are some really junior folks, but I'm talking about the seasoned professionals - those guys that may have been working in the web space for a while, or working on back-end systems, or library builders… they are all just as smart as I am. The only difference, so I thought, between them and me is that I worked so much harder that it was just a matter of effort.
This little gem of a tweet says in 140 characters what I keep missing over and over again - that when you look at really bad code, it's often times more likely that the author didn't know any better, or was using too much StackOverflow, and really had no idea what they are doing. So adding comments to this mess is only going to increase the line count and not really add value to the work.
I need to remember this more often.