Refactoring 005 — Replace Comment with Function Name
Comments should add value. And function names too.
Published in
2 min readJun 7, 2022
TL;DR: Don’t comment on what you are doing. Name what you are doing.
Problems Addressed
- Bad Names
- Comments
Related Code Smells
Steps
- Name the function with the previous comment
- Remove the Comment
Sample Code
Before
<?function repl($str) {
// Replaces with spaces the braces $str = str_replace(array("\{","\}")," ",$str);
return $str;}
After
<?// 1. Name the function with the previous comment
// 2. Remove the Commentfunction replaceBracesWithSpaces($input) { return str_replace(array("\{","\}")," ", $input);}
Type
[X] SemiAutomatic
Some IDEs have this refactoring although naming is not fully automatic.
Why the code is better?
Comments always lie.
It is hard to maintain comments.
On the contrary, Functions are alive and self-explanatory.
Limitations
As always, very important design decisions are valid comments.
Tags
- Comments
See also
Credits
Image by Jannik Texler from Pixabay
This article is part of the Refactoring Series.
