I think that, in many cases, “what” and “why” are very similar to each other or are closely related.

I’ve had an experience like this on more than one occasion - I come into an established code base for the first time. I’m working on a new feature/refactor/bug fix. I am reading through a function that is relevant to me, scratching my head a bit, and thinking “I think I see what this function is doing, but why did they do it such a screwy way?” Often there are no comments to give me any clues.

In the past, I have foolishly changed the code, thinking that I knew better… But what often happens is that I soon discover why my predecessor did something that looked so weird to me. They weren’t stupid - there was a reason for it! And then I end up putting it back…

Point being, in a situation like that the “what” and the “why” are going to have a lot of overlap. So, personally, I try to write comments that highlight assumptions that won’t be obvious from reading the code, external constraints that matter but don’t actually show up in the code, and so on.

I am far from perfect at it and I probably don’t write enough comments. But when I do, I try to write comments that will be reminders to myself, or fill in gaps in context for some hypothetical new person. I try to avoid comments that literally explain the code unless it’s particularly (and unavoidably) complex.

Glory to you and your house!

“Why” comments make more sense as application complexity grows.

You also have to consider interaction of the code with other external systems - sometimes external APIs force you to write code in ways you might not otherwise and it’s good to leave a trail for others on your team (and your future self…) about what was going on there.

C seems like an awfully painful way to write the CRUD apps most of us spend our time on.

And any performance gains would be invisible in most situations where network I/O is the biggest bottleneck (almost) regardless of the language used.

Whether you use Windows or Linux, the Windows key is the foundation of many useful keyboard shortcuts. You know, hold it down plus some other key.

Whatever your preferred OS, look them up! You may find a few you would like to start using.

But yeah, on my work computer which is a Windows machine, I often use it to open the start menu and start typing the name of the app I want to launch. It’s faster than clicking on an icon somewhere if your hands are already on the keyboard.

There are teams where I work that are basically using Excel as a database and SharePoint as S3 in automated processes… But at least no one is going to DIE when those things fall over!

The product may have been useless, but they had some awesome art for their advertisement!

Personally, I have also had great experiences with the HP line of business laptops - Probooks and Elitebook.

Allow me to reveal my age by saying… No, duh!!!

The only possible way Microsoft can be this bad at naming things is if they are actively doing it on purpose.

I know this may be an unpopular opinion on lemmy, which leans so heavily towards Linux and FOSS, and I’m a Linux user myself but….

I actually really like C# and .NET (the modern cross-platform version anyway).

That’s just what I was going to say - that will either be Arch or Debian…

2K of RAM? Time to port over some Atari 2600 games!

That’s awesome

Double dumbass on you!

I’m just going to hang out over here with my (modded) PC games from the early 2000s that I love so much…

Modern AAA gaming is not for me.

“Nerdy guy who has trouble with women” has been a decent premise for a story for a long time. It even allows for some character development.

But the way it was handled in TNG with Geordi was terrible. Geordi, and LeVar Burton deserved a lot better than that.

And this is why mocks are bad…

Ah, the list of required skills on the last job posting I looked at…

O’Brien is my favorite character in all of Trek. And as much as part of me would like to see him again, sometimes a character’s story is over and that’s ok!