The Daily WTF

“Comments are important,” is one of those good rules that often gets misapplied. No one wants to see a method called addOneToSet and a comment that tells us Adds one item to the set.

Still, a lot of our IDEs and other tooling encourage these kinds of comments. You drop a /// or /* before a method or member, and you get an autostubbed out comment that gives you a passable, if useless, comment.

Scott Curtis thinks that is where this particular comment originated, but over time it decayed into incoherent nonsense:

///<summary> True to use quote value </summary> /// ///<value> True if false, false if not </value> private readonly bool _mUseQuoteValue

True if false, false if not. Or, worded a little differently, documentation makes code less clear, clearer if not.

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