Original subtitles

Let's talk about another developer fundamental and this one is commenting your code.

Up until now you may have seen me comment at comments to our script's for example right here.

I added a comment of billions and this tells the Python interpreter hey this is a comment.

Don't run this it's just for me.

You can just ignore it and skip over to line two and you saw that I simply did that in Python with the

punchline.

As soon as Python sees a pound sign it adds a comment and you can do that after a line as well.

I can say this assigns to a variable and although this may look like two lines it's actually just the

word wrapping that's happening and you can see that the interpreter just completely ignores these comments.

Now commenting sounds very very simple but it's an important concept.

And if you want to be a good programmer in all languages we have commenting.

But there's good ways and bad ways of commenting and this is something that comes with practice.

But here are some key guidelines when you're commenting your code.

The idea is that you're adding valuable comments.

That is if I add a comment here that says hey this is a sign the name variable a value of Andre string

a comment like this is not really good.

Why is that.

Well because your code should be self explanatory.

Right.

The idea is for us to write code that is easy to read easy to understand.

It's not trying to be clever.

Instead it should read like English and any python programmer would know that here we're just simply

adding Andre as a value of name.

We're assigning a variable and adding a comment like this.

That's self-explanatory just adds clutter to your code so there's a tradeoff here.

It's good to comment your code for let's say you if you're working on teams and other developers come

and they want to understand your code but you have to remember this principle of code being easy to

read.

The only time you want to add comments to your code is well when something really really important is

happening where it might be a little complex you first decide hey is this code written in a way that

makes sense.

For example if this was variable a and this was variable B well this might be really hard for somebody

to understand.

So you might say that this is is cool.

Flag but before you add that comment you want to say to yourself maybe my code is hard to read.

Maybe I should just change the variable to is cool to make it more understandable.

Now this is something that you improve upon more and more and you do want to use comments as an extra

tool to make your code understandable.

Maybe you write code that six months from now you want to go back to understand what you did.

But remember more comments doesn't necessarily mean better code.

You want to be concise and keeping things simple while adding comments only when necessary to help others

understand your code not trying to make your unreadable code more readable.

We'll explore this topic and give you advice on it throughout the course.

But remember this key developer fundamental because you're going to need it throughout your career.

By the way this article over here has some really important points that I think you'll really benefit

from especially in the commenting best practices.

You can read some of the dos and don'ts and what some of the top programmers do when commenting.

I know it sounds silly but it is an important concept that most courses overlook.

So I highly recommend you read over this.

I'll link to it in the resources and I'll see you in the next video.