I'm not allowed to comment my code, so what are other ways to make my code descriptive but...

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Christopher Burke


As so many others have written: this is not a healthy team; it has bad computer science fundamentals and worse human factors fundamentals. As to what you do:

• Write code without comments, as the team demands
• Write self-documenting variable names, as the team demands
• Document the demands the team made, so that it’s clear that you did what you did at the team’s insistence
• Write a good resume and get out of there

Once in a while a team falls in love with the cure for one of its old ailments, and elevates that cure to the status of religious dogma. I remember a team that was convinced, 20 years ago, that the only good real-time program was an asynchronous real-time program. I remember another, 10 years ago, that thought HAXE was the only language worth writing in. Eventually people get over such foolishness by building and operating real systems; until then there’s not much you can do to change their minds.



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Christian Winter


I'm not allowed to comment my code, so what are other ways to make my code descriptive but not annoying to write out?

I work for a team that heavily believes in self documenting variable names. While I see the worth in that, its honestly not all that useful to someone new to the code base.

Use a clear architectural structure, use telling class, method and variable names. It does not matter if they are getting rather verbose, the compiler will optimize the names out anyway.

I was told to delete all my comments because it takes up memory or something.

I think my brain just skipped a beat. They did WHAT? Make you delete all comments because they take up memory? What was the year again, 1983? Comments are optimized out of the binary code by the compiler, so the comments are mainly in your repositories where you have hard drives which are insanely cheap and we are probably only talking about a few megabytes worth of comments.

What can I do?

In the long run, get out of the team. That is utter nonsense. It is ludicrous not to do any documentation to begin with but forcing others not to do any documentation, even delete the documentation that was already there, is utterly moronic. The larger the code base gets the more of a pain in the ass it will be to maintain and enhance without proper documentation.



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