We found a problem! Let start a startup: "Intelligent code review tool for smart developers, which want to keep comments in their code up to date". The tool will use AI to learn which parts of code are modified often in unison, and then propose to check them also during code review. It will also check for copy-pasted code blocks, and for snippets from StackOverflow with known bugs. The tool will reduce code review time by 10%, reduce number of bugs slipped trough code review by 20%, improve time to ship by 7%, bla bla bla, and instruct the coffee machine to prepare a coffee just in time for the review.
I guess I have been lucky but I don't really get this. You read comments along with the actual code right? They complement one another. An out of date comment should not ipso facto render code indecipherable and if it does that speaks to a bigger problem with the code itself.
I find it strange that people want to throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to commenting code just cause they've been bit before.
You don’t see how you could end up wasting time when a comment led to you making an incorrect assumption? If they don’t affect how you read the code would mean they’re useless.
I can see how it could, in theory, if the code is extremely complicated and then the comments are lying to you on top. Again I have never experienced this or anything even close to it in 1.5 decades of coding on teams. Unless every comment is wrong then some of them are useful to someone.
On the other hand, I have been bit plenty of times by incorrect documentation outside of code about libraries and APIs.
Fair enough. I will say my recommendation is for writing useful inline comments ("the why" comments and more rarely "the what").
File-level and function-header type comments that tend to generate docs (eg. Doxygen) are certainly more likely to fall out of date (easy to miss in a PR diff etc) and I don't really support using them anyway.
