Comments on: SortAndDelete

By: sysmod

sysmod — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 16:38:14 +0000

I know he was, but it was too good an opportunity to miss a quote out of context. Like those theatre reviews that say “This is a great show compared to a poke in the eye with a short stick” and only the first bit gets quoted ;-)

By: Bob Phillips

Bob Phillips — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 12:29:08 +0000

Well I admit that I thought that you had turned. You should have saved it for a few months.

By: Simon

Simon — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 00:15:38 +0000

I hope you realise I was being sarcastic, comments are for back covering and rude jokes. Worse than useless for code quality.

By: Marcus from London

Marcus from London — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 11:03:29 +0000

A colleague showed me a comment at the end of several pages of dynamic SQL construction Access VBA code he was maintaining.

‘ If you got this far, it must have worked

By: Paul Christie

Paul Christie — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 10:32:12 +0000

I once saw an error routine that consisted of a comment line that read
‘ This is a really good routine
and had three blank lines and no code.

As a factual statement the comment wasn’t wrong but I’ll leave my real thoughts on this for you all to imagine.

By: Bob Phillips

Bob Phillips — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 21:04:15 +0000

Surely, those sort of comments are exactly what brings comments into disrepute.

By: Patrick

Patrick — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 18:20:20 +0000

“(comments are vital to quality code).”

:Thank you :-)

By: chip

chip — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 15:38:45 +0000

Stephen you are a smarter man than I if you can recall your own code that quickly. I’m a “casual coder” and I comment extensively.

My favorite comment I found in some SQL code was something like:

–WTF?! Why do my customer counts not match? Who are these extra people?

and then later in the code:

–Oh, I see. They are from the future. Let’s kill them, shall we?

(A few bad dates crept into the DB from client at some point, so we had a small number of customers whose first purchase was in 2020.)

By: Stephen Allen

Stephen Allen — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 08:02:12 +0000

I also have an AutoDeleteRows sub within my list of scripts for general use. Our attempt at limiting its potential misuse was to ensure that the database started in cell $A$1.

The script is 7 years old but I think the original concept was that (within Excel) a managed database would probably start outside the first cell in order to offer a separate title of heading.

This is not realy secure. I’ve often thought that the function should automatically take a copy of the datalist and work on that.

As regards code comments. I almost never use them in my own code. If I can’t read and understand it (7 years later) then it was no good in the first place.

By: kalx

kalx — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 02:06:03 +0000

People writing the checks don’t care about this. It sounds like the guy is tyring to gainsay your work for his immediate masters. I don’t know your world, but you should not let a mental midget like this get the better of you.