Is it possible to write good and understandable co

Question

Can any one suggest what is the best way to write good code that is understandable without a single line of comments?

Answer 1

I think code can be self-documenting to a large degree, and I think it's crucial, but reading even well-written code can be like looking at cells of the human body with a microscope. It sometimes takes comments to really explain the big picture of how pieces of the system fit together, especially if it solves a really complex and difficult problem.

Think about special data structures. If all that computer scientists had ever published about data structures were well-written code, few would really understand the relative benefit of one data structure over another -- because Big-O runtime of any given operation is sometimes just not obvious from reading the code. That's where the math and amortized analysis presented in articles come in.

Answer 2

It may not be comments, but, to help someone better understand what it going on you may need some diagrams explaining how the program should work, as, if a person knows the big picture then it is easier to understand code.

But, if you are doing something complex then you may need some comments, for example, in a very math intensive program.

The other place I find comments useful and important, is to ensure that someone doesn't replace code with something that looks like it should work, but won't. In that case I leave the bad code in, and comment it out, with an explanation as to why it shouldn't be used.

So, it is possible to write code without comments, but only if you are limited in what types of applications you are writing, unless you can explain why a decision was made, somewhere, and not call it a comment.

For example, a random generator can be written many ways. If you pick a particular implementation it may be necessary to explain why you picked that particular generator, as the period may be sufficiently long for current requirements, but later the requirements may change and your generator may not be sufficient.