Sometimes code simply cannot speak for itself, and then a comment is very welcome, sure.
What I learned though is that a lot of programmers suffer from a form of a "comment blindness". I was once asked to explain a piece of code for which I already provided that exact explanation in the form of a neat, verbose comment, on this every screen : )
In my experience, programmers develop this "comment blindness" kind of like an everyday person numbs themselves to omnipresent ads via so-called "banner blindness".
Basically, most of the comments one encounters are redundant, stale etc. and therefore useless. So the less comments overall, the better the chance for the ones that matter to stand out.
At the end, there's no silver bullet, and while as experienced programmers we find it obvious and needless to say, I guess it probably is a valid takeaway for juniors to take most guidelines as rules of thumb only, and avoid falling into dogmatism (the mother of cargo cult)...
I remember looking at used books in my college bookstore, and found one which had nearly every sentence highlighted in yellow. The book might as well have been dipped in yellow ink! Overuse of the highlighter amounted to not using it at all.
What I learned though is that a lot of programmers suffer from a form of a "comment blindness". I was once asked to explain a piece of code for which I already provided that exact explanation in the form of a neat, verbose comment, on this every screen : )
In my experience, programmers develop this "comment blindness" kind of like an everyday person numbs themselves to omnipresent ads via so-called "banner blindness".
Basically, most of the comments one encounters are redundant, stale etc. and therefore useless. So the less comments overall, the better the chance for the ones that matter to stand out.
At the end, there's no silver bullet, and while as experienced programmers we find it obvious and needless to say, I guess it probably is a valid takeaway for juniors to take most guidelines as rules of thumb only, and avoid falling into dogmatism (the mother of cargo cult)...