I tend to agree that comments are, in most cases, evil (or at least mildly malevolent), but I did come across one of the exceptions to the rule today.
While doing a bit of drive-by refactoring while fixing a bug, I reflexively changed this line:
RUBY:
-
unless instance_response.nil?
to this:
RUBY:
-
if instance_response
Then reading the comment above the line, expecting to delete it, it all came flooding back:
RUBY:
-
# Use instance_response.nil? to check if the HTTParty
-
# response's inner hash is empty.
-
# If you use 'if instance_response', it is always true.
Now you could maybe argue that this unexpected behaviour is because httparty uses just a little too much of that old method missing proxy magic (which of course isn't really magic at all), but that's not the point of this post.
In the end I pulled it out into a private method to make it clearer what was going on, but decided to leave the comment in.
RUBY:
-
def self.instance_returned? instance_response
-
# Use instance_response.nil? to check if the HTTParty
-
# response's inner hash is empty.
-
# If you use 'if instance_response', it is always true.
-
!instance_response.nil?
-
end