this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Programmer Humor
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Lmao me commenting my 14 line bash script, comments almost as long as the script itself.
I have a habit of forgetting "why'd I put this there" and at least with my scripts I can leave myself a note for future me.
The highest comment-to-code ratio I ever wrote was a CMD script that had to combine three different escaping conventions.
It was a good day when I got to throw that one away.
Adding the fourth, ultimate escape to it.
Sounds like a good use of comments. Explain why, not how. (that should be readable from the code for the most part. Unless you're having function calls like xmmmuldp (simd) )
Well, bash scripts are infamous for being arcane so commenting abundantly is better than nothing.
This actually makes a lot of sense. A computer executing the code and a human maintaining it need to know different things. A human needs to knon what the code does on a high level (what the programmer intended), how it handles (or does not handle) edge cases, etc. A computer only needs to know how to run the code at a super low level. Without comments, it is impossible to know if code is doing the right thing, or what is expected from the caller.