[AlisdairO]

> Programmers can’t realistically maintain them.

Why not? The effort involved is not very high.

If you mean that they won't maintain them, well, I agree. Sometimes I fail to do so myself - but that's my laziness, not because keeping a comment up to date is actually difficult. The fact that programmers can be lazy is why we put processes in place to catch ourselves - code reviews, code style enforcement, and so on.

[jasonlotito]

> Why not? The effort involved is not very high.

Because, realistically developers will be lazy. For example:

"Sometimes I fail to do so myself - but that's my laziness"

> code reviews

So, here is the thing, "programmers can be lazy." Programmers can also miss things. Code reviews don't catch everything.

So, when someone says "programmers can’t realistically maintain them", they are being realistic. Really. It's great to be hopeful, but the simple fact is, you can't trust that comments are maintained.

[AlisdairO]

Couldn't you use the exact same argument to say that it's realistically impossible to maintain a high quality, readable codebase, so why bother trying?

There's nothing that intensely difficult about implementing processes that keep at least the vast majority of comments up to date. If you don't feel like it, or your organisation doesn't have the will to enforce it, then fair enough. That's not the same as it being impossible.