"No Comment..."

January 26, 2003
(Sent in by someone who understandably wishes to remain anonymous...)

At a recent Extreme Programming contract, we followed XP's advice that excessive code comments are a sign of code that needs to be refactored. So with this in mind, we trawled through the source looking for "danger signal" code comments.

As it turned out, management didn't want us to spend time refactoring the code, because there was too much else to be getting on with (in which case you could question whether it was a "real" XP project because we weren't following all the practices!) Anyway these are some of the scarier comments that we found:

// Manky type-safe union gig to make persistence easier

// don't like this - can we think of a better way?

// to support Sybase's confused approach to strings

// difficult to achieve - the class that couldn't be found is this one

// I know this looks silly but it makes it easier to ...

// yes it sucks .. but no choice.

// nothing we can do

// no point in continuing...

// deliberately not yet implemented

// now implemented - could be slow

// This is the best we can do

// Makes no sense

// don't run this test just before midnight

// we hope that this will be thrown

// not yet implemented/unsupported

// change to avoid silly java String.substring problem

// difficult to achieve - the class that couldn't be found is this one

// this is a bit pants... it might be better to maintain a hashmap

// baby don't worry, 'bout a thing.

// will never happen ;->

// not strictly right

// pray they never change the implementation of HashMap

// probably nicer to do this another way, but I didn't

// we don't care

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Cracked me up!
Daniel NOCHANCEOF_JUNKFROMHERE@hotmail.com
I feel your pain...
disco das@dasmegabyte.org
"Kill the dog"
Martin Brown martin.brown@macquarie.com.au

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