this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024
1532 points (99.4% liked)

Programmer Humor

19623 readers
2719 users here now

Welcome to Programmer Humor!

This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!

For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.

Rules

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] englislanguage@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 4 months ago

One example for self documenting code is typing. If you use a language which enforces (or at least allows, as in Python 3.8+) strong typing and you use types pro actively, this is better than documentation, because it can be read and worked with by the compiler or interpreter. In contrast to documenting types, the compiler (or interpreter) will enforce that code meaning and type specification will not diverge. This includes explicitly marking parameters/arguments and return types as optional if they are.

I think no reasonable software developer should work without enforced type safety unless working with pure assembler languages. Any (higher) language which does not allow enforcing strong typing is terrible.