I think this is one of the most common misconceptions about DRY. Just because you have two times the same line in your code base it is not automatically a violation of DRY. If you compare if a number is bigger than 18 it is definitely not a good idea to extract that part if you are comparing the hour of the day once and the age the other time. In that case it would even be bad to create an abstration, and it would not be a violation of DRY. And I agree that something like this leads to code that is hard to maintain.

I have also seen well commented code, but in this article I concentrate on the bad ones. Are you saying you have never seen a bad code comment?

I agree with almost all of what you say, but the thing IME is that in most cases people learn to comment a lot, which results in comments that feel like they’ve been done just for the sake of it, which is one of the main problems IMO. It’s not like “just add a comment, it won’t hurt”, since comments can be immensely misleading and literally take a lot of time until figuring out that the comment was wrong if you trust the wrong ones.

I also agree that this tends to be worse with bad code, which also is not surprising. Sometimes it feels to me like people think they can fix bad code with some comments, and I think that is far from being true.

I also admit that especially the title of the article might be a bit provocative, but giving the general positive sentiment of comments I think this is called for. Sometimes you have to exaggerate a bit to get some attention. I don’t like click-baiting either, but unfortunately it works ;-)

I give you that, but I am not talking about assembly languages, therefore the examples from my blogpost aren’t showing any :-)

Totally agree, that’s why I also mentioned this in the article.

Very often good code that is self-explanatory does not need any comments at all and if it does, the comment should describe why it has been implemented this way instead of just repeating what the code already says.

Ah, you are talking about systemd, wasn’t aware of that… I imagine that to be much more complicated for many use cases. E.g. running a unit test (as I describe in the article) isn’t something I would use systemd for. Setting up a path and a service seems more complicated than using entr, and it is probably also harder to get to the output as well.

I am not exactly sure what you mean by that… But the main advantage is that the command does not have to be executed manually everytime you change something. Instead entr recognizes when something changes and re-executes the command for you.

That’s true, but the syntax is different then. In this blog post I cover fish, and I didn’t intent to say that this cannot be done in other shells (and I think I never said so).

Sure, web applications have different requirements and might warrant the use of more JavaScript than a website does. But one of the biggest problems nowadays IMO is that many developers choose these fancy technologies also for websites, just because they like them, without thinking too much about how that affects the user, and it does so in a mostly negative way. If you are building a website for the local bakery HTML and CSS backed by any CMS probably suffice, and there is no need to add the complexity of client-side JavaScript and SSR (or whatever) to it.

I think the point of the article (and I agree to that) is that “modern” websites (i.e. use heavy javascript frameworks) are having real issues that websites being built without loads of client-side javascript do not have. I guess some websites built in 2005 are performing better and are more accessible than websites being built today.