What is your personal approach/take on commenting?

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What are your hard rules about commenting?

A Developer I work with had some things to say about commenting that were interesting to me (see below). What is your personal approach/take on commenting?

"I don't add comments to code unless its a simple heading or there's a
platform-bug or a necessary work-around that isn't obvious. Code can change and comments may become misleading. Code should be
self-documenting in its use of descriptive names and its logical
organization - and its solutions should be the cleanest/simplest way
to perform a given task. If a programmer can't tell what a program
does by only reading the code, then he's not ready to alter it.
Commenting tends to be a crutch for writing something complex or
non-obvious - my goal is to always write clean and simple code."

"I think there a few camps when it comes to commenting, the enterprisey-type who think they're writing an API and some grand code-library that will be used for generations to come, the craftsman-like programmer that thinks code says what it does clearer than a comment could, and novices that write verbose/unclear code so as to need to leave notes to themselves as to why they did something."

Answer 1

Comments are part of a programmers toolbox and can be used and abused alike. It's not up to you, that other programmer, or anyone really to tell you that one tool is bad overall. There are places and times for everything, including comments.

I agree with most of what's been said here though, that code should be written so clear that it is self-descriptive and thus comments aren't needed, but sometimes that conflicts with the best/optimal implementation, although that could probably be solved with an appropriately named method.

Answer 2

In general I see comments used to explain poorly written code. Most code can be written in a way that would make comments redundant. Having said that I find myself leaving comments in code where the semantics aren't intuitive, such as calling into an API that has strange or unexpected behavior etc...