I recall being initially befuddled by the use of "I am..." statements in class comments. I also vaguely recall part of the justification for this approach being that the class name appearing only in code -the class definition and instantiating,... code- allows for a very malleable system. All the tools required for easily renaming a class are already provided within the system. Embedding the class name in the class comment would be undesirable since it would replicate that datum in a non-code location which is NOT accessed by the provided code management tools ('rename', 'all references',... .)
Now if a policy for including the class name in the class comment were adopted along with good tools for keeping code and comments in synch then this little argument would hold less weight. Just having tools and policy for better integrating code and comments would be nice. :-)
One historical point I'm compelled to raise is that of the linguistic context for the whole Smalltalk system. The choice of 'method' to replace 'subroutine'/'function' was confusing in its day and yet desirable for the sake of moving people out of one mode of thinking and into another. The use of "accept" rather than "save" for telling the 'live' system to both Save and Include as part of yourself this chunk of code was another -now seemingly quirky- choice made to convey what was really going on and shift ones thinking. The use of "I am..." in class comments was part of that same shifting. In a browser based environment it made sense to have a class (which was a first class object) describe itself (eg.'ClassDescription comment' messages the class 'ClassDescription' causing it to respond with a comment describing itself.) This actually implied that in fact the class was a legitimate entity unto itself and addressable in the same way as the system, 'Smalltalk', was addressable. It might seem quaint or even distracting now, but it was part of the subversive language that was chosen on purpose. Think in terms of objects as independent/interdependent entities that do their own things. Quirky? Yes. When introduced was it anymore difficult than grasping o-o concepts? No. Does it make as much sense now as the new names for minor changes in concept/implementation (eg. subroutine->method) ?
peace, donald
P.S. As far as I know, at the time class comments were introduced the idea of making comments (with templates non-the-less) an integral part of the system was new and bizzar.