My first coding mentor told me to stop using comments and let the code speak for itself

I spent 6 months following his advice on a group project and the senior dev said my code was unreadable, so now I'm wondering who was actually right here, has anyone else got conflicting advice from experienced devs that just made things worse?

2 comments

2 Comments

blair_davis5011d ago

Is there anything worse than getting clashing advice from two people who both seem to know what they are talking about? I once had a boss tell me to never refactor old code, then a few months later another boss made me rewrite everything from scratch because it was "too messy." I ended up just splitting the difference and only adding comments when I knew future me would be completely lost without them.

foster.ruby12d ago

Used to think "code should speak for itself" too, but after cleaning up too many of my own uncommented messes I realized comments help future me more than they help anyone else.