Hi!
Kent Beck teaches that a comment is your way of saying that a method isn't done, typically that its name is unclear or that it is poorly written. In the very successful C3 project, we name our methods to make sense, and we write them to be clear, and we hardly ever need comments.
It's not allways true, as comments are not here only to help the reader understand what's written, but to help the reader understand what the writer was thinking when he wrote it...
Suppose you write some chuck of code to calculate PI, fine, the name of the method will be enough to tell me what it's doing, but not to tell me why it works that way. May be you need to say something like "for more information see Knuth's book" or better you may need to say "For this method I have improved an algorithm that works ..." or "While doing this I noticed that if I choosed a better first value, by doing blah, I ended faster and with a better aproximation" or anithing else... How can you say all this things only with code? do you think it's not necesary to say all those things?
Commenter bye! Richie++