[agentultra]

You assume I'm young! How nice!

I read tonnes of code. I've formed my opinion by reading and reviewing tonnes of code. I'm cautious about jumping to conclusions.

In my experience the kind of code that requires comments to act as "guideposts," (if I've correctly interpreted your meaning) is suffering from symptoms of a larger problem: poor design. When I read code that comes from people who use this style I often find that their functions go on for ~70 LOC, use at least 3 levels of nesting, and are littered with comments to explain what is going on.

More often than not I was able to show them that they could break these procedures out into compose-able functions and drop the comments. With the right data-structures they could avoid excessive loops and conditionals. And with the right unit tests if they ever needed to change the implementation of a function they would know right away if they broke something. Suddenly they didn't need so many comments because their functions were < 10 LOC and self-explanatory -- the name of the function gave its meaning and the higher-level code read more like an explanation of the process without all of the details of how the machine should perform it.

That, of course, is the best case scenario. I've worked on a gnarly C++ web application that was more than a decade old and survived several attempts to port and extend it with Python. But you can deal with that too. Just try not to touch the legacy code. ;)