alt Hacker News> If you can't understand why the code is done in a certain way from reading it then the code is missing comments or needs to be refactored.
Code is never missing contexts. If what your code is doing is not obvious to the reader, it is bad code that needs to be fixed. Things like cryptic low-level expressions should be extracted to helper functions with descriptive names or even extracted into a class, and classes need to comply with the single responsibility principle.
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exe34 • today at 6:14 AM
yeah that's how a simple algorithm that would fit on a napkin gets broken up into a soup of ravioli that I have no hope to understand. I often end up refactoring it into a simple function in a branch so I can figure out wtf is going on.
Ah the classic thinking that 'code documents itself'. It does not. Some devs are so full of themselves they think their code is so good that it is obvious what their intent was. It never is obvious, and just ends up as tech debt. Write comments.