if the code changes and the comment isn’t updated accordingly, it can be ambiguous.

People always cite this as a reason comments are bad. In 30+ years as a developer I have seen (and participated in) a lot of failed software projects, but not once has a mismatch between comments and code been the actual cause of the failure. Moreover, the same logic could be applied to the names of methods and variables (“if the code changes and the method and variable names aren’t updated accordingly, it can be ambiguous”) but nobody ever suggests getting rid of that. At the end of the day, comments are useful for imparting information about the code to future developers (or yourself) that is too complicated to be adequately communicated by a method name.

One thing I always liked about the various flavors of BASIC was that nobody ever pushed that shit as a religion.

There’s a name for that: DEVELOPMESTUCTION

I learned it while at the same time learning (or really enhancing my previous knowledge of) javascript, thanks to an insane mostly-Finnish app development platform known as Qt Creator, which for no rational reason uses C++ for the under-hood-stuff and javascript for the UI front end. Just an absolutely horrible mismatch of mental states. For bonus points, the company that I worked for that used this monstrosity for its suite of apps got purchased by a huge west coast company and the apps were shut down and everybody was fired, after two years of my working on this shit.

I mean, it got the case right on every other letter.

You used to could, on Blackberry at least.

deleted by creator

At least it got the last letter kinda wrong.

:(

You kids today. In my day we used Visual Source Safe and would accidentally leave a critical file checked out when we went on vacation and nobody else could get anything done until we came back.

Borland IDEs

Ugh, you just gave me Turbo Basic flashbacks. My favorite thing was that variable names could be as long as you liked and mixed case, but the compiler only used the first two letters and case insensitive at that. So “BatShitCrazy” and “BALLPARKESTIMATE” actually referenced the same variable.

It needs 3D borders.

The double-space between “Excel” and “of” is what hurts me. Such a boss thing to do.

You push a button and it makes Little Leaguers do whatever you tell them to do. Very potent, should never be misused.

Yes, testing the new Little League control module on a field full of Little Leaguers was not the best plan.

Ironically, the worst thing I ever saw a coworker do was to change a function that accepted an Integer value between 0 and 32767 to one that accepted a Float between 0.0 and 1.0. Perfectly sensible change except that it resulted in a 120 mph knuckleball fired a foot above a 10 year old kid’s head, followed by a fist fight between the client and my boss.

Not really relevant, but I used to think Axl was singing “take me down to the very last city”.

I occasionally get texts offering to buy a house I used to live in. Which was in a state 800 miles from where I’m living now. Which I lived in for six months almost 30 years ago. And in which I just rented an apartment, the unit of which is part of the address they include in the text message. For bonus points, this house was torn down years ago.

I meant to say commits and not merges, and yes he removed the comments before committing. It made no difference in long run because every new release broke all the accessibility stuff anyway. It’s amazing how little developers can be made to care about blind people - almost as little as managers. The only reason my company cared at all was they were facing million-dollar-a-month fines from the FCC.

I spent a year making my company’s iOS apps accessible (meaning usable for the blind and people with vision disabilities). I had to do a lot of weird shit either because of bugs in Apple’s VoiceOver technology or because of the strange way in which our code base was broken up into modules (some of which I did not have access to) and I would always put in comments explaining why I was doing what I was doing. The guy doing code review and merges would always just remove my comments (without any other changes) because he felt that not only were comments unnecessary but also they were a “code smell” indicating professional incompetence. I feel sorry for whoever had to deal with that stuff at a later point.

I’ve never had a manager that was even aware of the comments vs. no comments issue. If I ever had, I would have just told them that a lack of comments makes the original coder harder to replace.