Recently I read a comment on Twitter by Nikola Poša:

I guess the discussion on my thread is going in the wrong direction because I left out a crucial hashtag: #NoCommentsInCode - avoid comments in code, write descriptive classes, methods, variables.https://t.co/MuHoOFXCvV

— Nikola Poša (@nikolaposa) July 13, 2018

He was providing us with a useful suggestion, one that I myself have been following ever since reading “Clean Code” by Robert Martin. The paraphrased suggestion in that book, as well as in the tweet, is to consider a comment to be a naming issue in disguise, and to solve that issue, instead of keeping the comment. By the way, the book has some very nice examples of how comments should and should not be used.

I wanted to share an important lesson I learned from my colleague Ramon de la Fuente. I was explaining to him how I made a big effort to preserve some existing behavior, when he said something along the lines of: the people who wrote this code, may or may not have known what they were doing. So don’t worry too much about preserving old stuff.

These wise words eventually connected to other things I’ve learned about programming, and I wanted to combine them under the umbrella of a blog post titled “Deliberate coding”. Doing something “deliberately” means to do it consciously and intentionally. It turns out that not everyone writes code deliberately, and at the very least, not everyone does it all the time.