These are arguments talking past each other. Sure 1 useful comment and 9 redundant ones can be better than zero, but comments are not reliable and often get overlooked in code changes and become misleading, sometimes critically misleading. So often the choice is between not enough comments versus many comments that you cannot trust and will sometimes tell you flat-out lies and overall just add to the difficulty of reading the code.
There’s no virtue in the number of comments, high or low. The virtue is in the presence of quality comments. If we try to argue about how many there should be we can talk past each other forever.
Too many is still better than too few, and it’s not close. Useless comments make parsing a bit harder. Missing comments can mean hours of research.
These are arguments talking past each other. Sure 1 useful comment and 9 redundant ones can be better than zero, but comments are not reliable and often get overlooked in code changes and become misleading, sometimes critically misleading. So often the choice is between not enough comments versus many comments that you cannot trust and will sometimes tell you flat-out lies and overall just add to the difficulty of reading the code.
There’s no virtue in the number of comments, high or low. The virtue is in the presence of quality comments. If we try to argue about how many there should be we can talk past each other forever.