DEV Community

Discussion on: On code readability in object-oriented languages

Collapse
 
mortoray profile image
edA‑qa mort‑ora‑y

No, interpreting radians that way is just wrong. We have to assume that the people working on our project have at least taken a passing interest in the domain and would understand the commonly used, and perhaps uncommonly used terms. Trying to communicate to somebody that knows nothing about what's going on is a waste of time.

Your comment also causes confusion. Does this mean I can't use this function where it doesn't involve UI? Is this conversion somehow special to the values that a user might input. You've done the opposite of what a comment should do: you've added unclarity where before there was none.

Thread Thread
 
mindlace profile image
Ethan Fremen • Edited

"Assuming a passing interest in the domain" is good, assuming everyone in your team has a common set of vocabulary is more problematic. For the specific example you gave, I admit my interpretation as temperature was contrived.

I frequently work with people for whom english is not their first language, and I have found that describing even "obvious" function names has been very helpful.

Also agreed that the one liner I gave was not helpful by itself; to match the form of the article, my comment would have fit in the "Intent" line.

In reflecting on your feedback, I realized that I mostly use "why" comments inside function bodies whenever I'm doing something weird. So I guess unless your function is doing something weird, "why" comments matter less.