The Daily WTF

Yesterday, I briefly mentioned the “TODO” comment as part of the WTF. Anyone who develops software for long enough is going to develop some pet peeves. Lord knows, my feelings on Hungarian Notation are well established. Or ternaries, though honestly, for ternaries, I mostly am in it for the puns.

But, I’ve got another pet peeve that’s crawling up my butt far enough that I felt the need to do a soapbox about it.

//TODO: explain why I hate //TODO

Yes, I’m about to suggest that TODO comments should go away, or at the very least, need to be used well, which they frequently (always?) are not. There’s nothing inherently wrong about leaving a TODO in code, but there are a lot of things that can go wrong with them. Enough things that go wrong that I’ll just come right out and say that TODOs are a code smell.

To read the full article click on the 'post' link at the top.