Comments are beautiful

Knowing what the hell you are doing is very important and in the world of programming, letting others know what the hell you are doing is just as important.

We, at least some of us, code for a living. We cannot support it forever. We might change profession, move on to a ‘grass is greener’ place, worst yet we might not exist at all! There will always be another person working on our code, making a living trying to fix the issues (that we thought will never exist), making it better suite the ‘current world’.

This job is certainly not easy. Code is a way for us to let the machines know what we want them to do. They don’t understand it, they just follow your instructions blindly. A human cannot change these instructions without first understanding them. Understanding these instructions are like understanding the thought process of the original programmer and you know how messed up our thoughts are. How is one supposed to understand it?

This is exactly where comments are life savers. Literally. They are not ugly; they are beautiful. They let the lesser mortals know what the creator was thinking when he created his masterpieces. They make someone else’s life easy. I’m not kidding, they earn you respect!

We will not exist forever, neither do these code that we create. However, they might outlive our short IT lives. What kind of a legacy do we want to leave behind?