[jasonlotito]

> If they express those views, I wouldn't call them senior.

I wouldn't be so hasty as to assume that anyone making the above claim should be taken literally. Indeed, frowning on detailed commenting (or commenting at all) seems more like hyperbole then anything. After all, what is "detailed commenting"? It's not indication of quality.

    // Increments x by 1
    x++;

That is a detailed comment, but hardly worth while.

And the commenting at all remark does not indicate that all commenting is to be avoided. Rather that comments should be scrutinized. After all, comments are indicative of a confusion. If your code requires a comment to explain itself, maybe it's best to review what you are doing, and work to avoid confusion.

> it's rarely possible to express -- purely in code -- what the code is supposed to do, what the input is supposed to be, and what the output is supposed to be.

It's actually fairly easy to do that in all languages I'm aware of. It's part of the reason you have Unit Tests. To document what the code can do, but also the expected input and output. More often than not, we forget that.

I dislike the idea of promoting comments for the sake of comments. I much prefer the push for clarity in code. Limiting clarity to comments is bad form, and generally those pushing for lots of comments excuse confusing code because they use comments freely. They also believe that these comments will remain relevant, and make the call that should they not, it's not their problem, but the programmer that fails to update the comment.

This is akin to blocking user out of an account after the first wrong password entered. It's their mistake, after all. And our jobs as programmers are not write robust code. Comments cannot (and should not) affect that code, and relying on comments to provide the quality missing from the code is lazy.

[flatline3]

Unit tests validate invariants, but they don't express them in a concise form, and they're not a suitable form of documentation.

[jasonlotito]

> Unit tests validate invariants, but they don't express them in a concise form

I'd be more in line to say that if your Unit Tests aren't concise, then it's a problem with your Unit Tests, or at least, your implementation.

> and they're not a suitable form of documentation

Well, the output that you can generate form unit tests can easily be documentation, explaining in great detail exactly what can be done with what is being tested, without any hand waving either.

Still, that doesn't take away from everything else I said. In the end, if you rely on comments to explain your code, your code is probably lacking.