Are You Proud of Your Code?

An anonymous reader writes "I am downright embarrassed by the quality of my code. It is buggy, slow, fragile, and a nightmare to maintain. Do you feel the same way? If so, then what is holding you back from realizing your full potential? More importantly, what if anything are you planning to do about it? I enjoy programming and have from a young age (cut my teeth on BASIC on an Apple IIe). I have worked for companies large and small in a variety of languages and platforms. Sadly the one constant in my career is that I am assigned to projects that drift, seemingly aimlessly, from inception to a point where the client runs out of funding. Have any developers here successfully lobbied their company to stop or cut back on 'cowboy coding' and adopt best practices? Has anyone convinced their superiors that the customer isn't always right and saying no once in awhile is the best course of action?"

Comments

Sorry, I have to bite about this.

[Fross]

I am one of those people who likes lots of code. So much so that I've developed a style, similar to how I used to code 68k assembler, of running comments down a second column (usually 40-60 characters in) that describes what is going on. After all, it doesn't interrupt the flow of the code, and if you're editing Java on an 80-column fixed-width interface, you're doing it wrong to begin with. I wouldn't say I comment every line, probably one in every 3. However, this gripe with over-commenting is fundamentally flawed:

and I've met people who won't even look at code unless every single line is commented telling them precisely what it does, so "int i = a + 2;" has to have a comment above it saying "// create a signed 32-bit integer variable, i, and assign it two more than the value of a".

Why on earth would you write a comment like that? That is ridiculous. However, the line DOES need a comment. It's declaring a variable with a non-descriptive name and doing something specific with it. Now, the comment should do something like say what the variable is used for, if it's non-obvious. In this case, "int i" is usually used for loops, so it doesn't need a comment unless it's *not* used for loops. :) However, if it was being used in a loop, why is it being set to a+2? Is a some sort of offset in an array? Is it a user-entered value? THIS is what the comments will illustrate, eg:

int i = a + 2; // skip the first two elements in the loop as they contain other data

or

int i = a + 2; // user input will be off by 2 because of (strange reason here)

writing comments like "initialise variable" is useless, but thinking that may be all there is shows a misunderstanding about how comments work.

You can assume the person reading your code is a programmer, familiar with the language used, and able to follow general program flow. However, he may not be familiar with the rest of the system, nor with any specific tricks you may use[1]. Comments should be like a director's commentary on the code, pointing out what may not be obvious, and giving the bigger picture - the reason why a specific variable is used a certain way, or what a messy few lines of code may be achieving, eg: // now split the input into an array and parse ready to give to the file handler
(horrible loop declaration here)
(even more horrible regex here)
(custom function calling here)

It's said comments are like sex - even when they're bad, they're still pretty good. I'm pretty sure I've never spent 3 hours trying to work out how to get THAT to work, though!

[1] eg, I use a relatively uncommon trick in Java doing string comparisons of if(!"blah".equals(myString)) because it can't fail on the null pointer check that if(!myString.equals("blah")) can. A simple example, but something more complicated will save someone time if it just has a quick comment next to it saying what that section of code is achieving.