[ascendant]

This discussion is one that will never die because people will always have entrenched, dogmatic viewpoints on this. I dislike comments that explain what you're doing. The code should be readable enough to see what you're doing. However having spent over a decade now maintaining code written by people that may not be with the organization anymore, it's always nice to occasionally get context on WHY someone wrote the code they did. Odd bugs and subsequent workarounds, weird client requirements, etc. I've spent many hours trying to figure out why someone did something because they're not around anymore to ask. We can go on and on about the purity of code and how readable it should be but no amount of concise code can replace "did this because of client requirement X,Y and Z" right there so I don't have to go hunting to find out. The gulf between how things SHOULD be and how they ACTUALLY are is pretty wide in my experience.

[endeavor]

I think parent's import point is that comments should document WHY you are doing something. The code itself should easily convey the WHAT and HOW.

"Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." - http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/front/node3.html