Don’t be a liar | Ivan Tse

If your code is lying to me, I don’t know what else in your code I can trust. As trust in a project’s code slowly degrades, so does developer effectiveness and happiness. You really have no reason to lie with your code. And each lie builds on the next to create a seriously big pile of poo.

When writing software, we’ve got a million things in our minds. We’re holding call stacks in our head while we’re staying focused on our goals. We’re considering the specs we’re working on implementing. We’re thinking about whether a module’s responsibilities are sane. We’ve got a lot of things going on.

And here you’re trying to give me an additional thing to keep in my head that’s ambiguous and will require me to probably git blame you and send you a message so I can ask you what you were trying to do here.

When you have a comment that isn’t accurately reflecting the code its referring to, you’re essentially hiding bugs with your own words. I’m sure you’ve done this before:

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