[krapp]

>To me, comments are noise, and code is signal; the code is what actually executes.

Comments are noise to the compiler, but code is both a communication between humans and from humans to machines. To imply that only what executes is signal and all else noise is to ignore half the purpose of code, which is documentation.

And despite what a lot of people want to believe, code itself is often not sufficiently self-documenting.

[geofft]

More importantly, today's code is an optional basis of tomorrow's code. When NASA wrote the code for Skylab, I bet the comments in this codebase were the only useful thing in it and the code was all noise.

If you don't want to spend your career rewriting the same thing over and over again for slightly different business use cases and platforms, comments are incredibly valuable. (On the other hand, I guess there's a lot of job security in being hired to write the same thing many times....)