Yes, comments are bad. Of course, leaving a piece of very confusing code uncommented is worse, in which case you pick the lesser evil of commenting your tricky hack. But, if you can refactor your hack into code that is so easy that it warrants no comments, that's best of all.
Javadoc, of course, aren't comments at all. These are API documentation. For places where API documentation is out of place (which aren't very many places; a proper project has lots of modules, internal or no, and that means somebody, possibly even yourself in another source file, is a user of your 'API' so to speak), lack of javadoc is obviously fine. There's also very little point in documenting a method with the obvious, i.e. documenting a setName method in a Person class with 'sets the name of the person', especially if you then also throw some @param etc tags on there. Utter waste of time and a complete pain if you ever want to refactor this code. So, the gist is right. I can't tell if they are going overboard with this sentiment without looking at the code, though. On Friday, August 17, 2012 11:18:26 AM UTC+2, Carl Jokl wrote: > > I had a discussion very recently within my company regarding the source > code produced and that it has almost no comments in it. I was told quite > confidently by the developer I spoke to that this was a deliberate company > decision and that the code should be clear enough that no comments > were necessary. Also it was said that the code and methods were changing so > often that it would just be painful overhead to keep JavaDoc comments up to > date. > > I understand the principle of trying to make code self documenting and > clear enough so that it does not need lots of documentation. I am not sure > however how I feel about the idea of using this argument not to add much of > any comments at all. Am I just not with the times or Agile enough? > > What are your thoughts? > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Java Posse" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/javaposse/-/i2z1vWqk8aEJ. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
