That's my immediate reaction watching these programmers argue about what color their comments should be when reading code. It seems those who write sparse comments want them to pop out of the screen, and those who comment more heavily like to provide a background hum of human commentary that's useful to read in certain contexts and otherwise easy to filter out.

Now that I think about it, this matches my experience. I've experienced good codebases commented both sparsely and heavily. The longer I spend with a sparsely-commented codebase, the more I cling to the comments it does have. They act as landmarks, concise reminders of invariants. However, as I grow familiar with a heavily-commented codebase I tend to skip past the comments. Code is non-linear and can be read in lots of ways, with lots of different questions in mind. Inevitably, narrative comments only answer some of those questions and are a drag the rest of the time.

I'm reminded of one of Lincoln's famous quotes, a fore-shadowing of the CAP theorem. Comments can be either detailed or salient, never both.

Comments are versatile. Perhaps we need two kinds of comments that can be colored differently. Are there still other uses for them?

comments

  
Hugo Schmitt, 2012-11-26: Yes, maybe that is the case. Docstrings are different from comments on Python, for example.   
Kartik Agaram, 2013-04-04: Perhaps the different kinds of comments are meant for readers with different levels of motivation? http://alistair.cockburn.us/Shu+Ha+Ri

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