This is just a /* comment */ on the --comment

…because it is ODC Appreciation Day

Let’s use this wonderful #ThanksODC initiative by Tim Hall to do my first blog post.

I don’t want to discuss the pros and cons such as

• long vs. short comments or
• developers not having time to document their work properly

For sure there are many more aspects to cover, but here is just a quick version of why I think comments in all kinds of appearances deserve a portion of applause on ODC Appreciation Day.

I love them because developers can prettify code. Also, we hear a lot about best practices, but sometimes they just don’t fit to the current situation in real live. Whenever I faced that situation in the past, I tried to force myself to at least provide some quick comments why I chose such an approach in my code.

Also some complex SQL queries can get annoying when the initial thoughts of a developer are not present. I try to divide complex queries into some smaller parts. Then I do a kind of documentation for each part of the SQL by adding comments.

There is more: Hopefully it is known that commenting on objects is possible, e.g. columns or tables:

comment on column my_tab.col_a '...this is useful information for any developer'; 
comment on table my_tab is '...this is useful information for any developer';

But hey, did You know? You can even write Your comments on Editions (EBR)…check it out Yourself in the Oracle Docs

Personally, I love this SQL Developer Feature: If You go to Tools -> Preferences -> Shortcut Keys -> search for “Toggle Line Comments” and You are able to define Your own shortcut to comment/uncomment many lines.

I don’t know if that still counts as a comment but we might want to talk about the value of nice commit messages when checking code into version control systems. For sure there are other useful developer written comments in the official documentation. But nobody RTFM ;-)

There are also these funny aspects:

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/184618/what-is-the-best-comment-in-source-code-you-have-ever-encountered
• https://twitter.com/iamdevloper/status/657130347109351424

I like some quotes, for example this one by Martin Fowler

“Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.”

Adding comments might help to improve code quality.

Mm…and hey developers! Don’t forget to adopt the comment next time when changing the underlying piece of code…that might confuse me!

--no more comments ;-)

Jonas

^{Beam me up, Scotty}