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> You need to use comments to explain the code – Code should be able to explain itself and should be in a format that is easily readable. If you find yourself needing to explain what your code is doing then you may want to look into rewriting that code. EDIT: This is not referring to using comments (e.g. javadoc) to explain the purpose of a method/class and its inputs and outputs.

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Oh dear god, that nonsense again. That might be true when you write boring, straightforward business code. But when you implement a complex algorithm, that's just silly.

It's also silly if, for example, you need to do "clever" things for performance reasons. Any comment that explains the why behind your code is a good comment.

See the recently discussed square-root approximation algorithm as an example.

This is only true of "unclever" code. You haven't written a lot of code if you haven't found a concise, optimized, abstract way to solve problems that aren't intuitive when first seen with the naked eye.

We aren't writing books, we're writing instructions for a computer and those two things can sometimes be very, very different.

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