Comments for Kerry Buckley

Comment on Unimplemented specs in RSpec by roger

roger — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 17:06:50 +0000

looks like you can also do

it “should do something” do
pending “an announcement”
end

it “should do something” do
pending “an announcement” do
end
end

Comment on Managing gems in a Rails project by Chad Woolley

Chad Woolley — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 08:40:56 +0000

Very good summary, thanks Kerry. However, Bundler hasn’t solved ALL the problems. Native gems can still break you on new environments.

I think this is a reason to use Jruby :)

– Chad

Comment on Facebook by Roy50

Roy50 — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 22:20:51 +0000

Cloud computing is great conceptually, but there is still a lot of FUD out there about what it is and how it works exactly. ,

Comment on Comments aren’t always evil by FND

FND — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 12:26:14 +0000

Thanks Kerry.
I actually agree with that description. So I guess it’s just the “comments are evil” rallying cry being a bit too misleading…

Comment on Comments aren’t always evil by Darren

Darren — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 16:17:25 +0000

You could use a method whose name explains what the line of code does but it would probably be reflexively inlined by someone who sees it later anyway.

Comment on Comments aren’t always evil by Kerry

Kerry — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 20:52:15 +0000

Obviously ‘evil’ is, as ever, an exaggeration, but comments should be a last resort. Much better to make the intention clear by, for example, extracting a local variable or provate method and giving it a meaningful name. Obviously there are some cases where comments are useful, but I like to only put them in when I can’t think of a way of clarifying things in the code itself.

The insidious thing about unnecessary comments is that they tend to go out-of-date. People change the code, but leave the comments, so they end up describing behaviour that’s no longer there, or they get separated from the code they were supposed to describe.

Comment on Comments aren’t always evil by FND

FND — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 20:27:16 +0000

So shortly after posting about the evilness of code comments, comments on your blog stop working? Interesting…

Anyway, why are comments evil?
(Your link leads to a 1 hr podcast… )

Sure, they can be overused – but they can also be very useful and important.

Even Python code (*bait*) isn’t always obvious enough to not require explanatory comments.

As a general rule of thumb, I think the code explains the *what* while comments explain the *why*.

I’d rather have too much commenting than too little.

Comment on Commenting broken by Kerry

Kerry — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 20:02:27 +0000

OK, switched to a different theme for now. Comments seem to work again.

Comment on A couple of rspec mocking gotchas by Kerry

Kerry — Thu, 28 May 2009 20:10:10 +0000

Tickets 830 and 831 raised. Sorry, should have done that earlier.

Comment on A couple of rspec mocking gotchas by David Chelimsky

David Chelimsky — Thu, 28 May 2009 17:58:15 +0000

Hey Kerry – you’ve uncovered a couple of nasty bugs here – would you kindly report them to http://rspec.lighthouseapp.com so we can talk there about how to get them fixed?

Thanks,
David