What's the golden code/comment ratio? [closed]

Answer 1

I have to say I came here looking for an answer around 2 of comments per 1 line of code. Even if this is an exaggeration it's in the right direction! Instead I see people recommending treating comments like truffles or other rare commodity. Looking from a peculiar perspective of academia, were code quality is low and use of version control is even rarer then truffles I would urge anyone to write as much comments as possible, even against your own judgement of whether the comment is 100% necessary.

Comments make your life easier because chances are you are going to be thinking, what the hell was I thinking when writing this!

Answer 2

There is no such thing as a good comment to code ratio. In the old days some people believed that you needed to have a comment at the head of every function explaining what it does.

However, with the advent of modern languages code is pretty much self documenting. This means that the only reasons left to put a comment in the code is to either explain where an oddball decision came from or to help with understanding a really complicated subject.

Answer 3

LOC / LOcomment = yearsofexp / 5

Answer 4

I like to use commenting to annotate code that I make sure is easy to read and has informative variables. That being said, I like to try to write every line of code to be as informative as a comment if possible. You should be able to have a very strong gist of what the code does before you read the comments, or you're doing it wrong.

Answer 5

Sorry, there is not rule of thumb. Frameworks and libraries, per instance, requires much more comments because programmers will be customers and haven't time to read code every time they need to invoke a method.

Projects where you are writing/reading code needs less comments and should try to improve code readability instead of comment/code ratio.

Kind Regards

Answer 6

between 3% and 9.5%, more or less