Used sparingly comments can be very good. One should comment non-obvious things or gotchas. Where it goes completely of the rails is when programmers are forced

Used sparingly comments can be very good. One should comment non-obvious things or gotchas. Where it goes completely of the rails is when programmers are forced to write comments in mandated places. One ends up with a code base where half of the code consists of comments that point out the absolute obvious. DatabaseConnection connnection; // Connection to the database. // Write a log line when the system is intialized logger.info("The system was initialized successfully."); When I see such comments I am severely tempted to conclude that if one is going to have a policy on comments forbidding them would do less harm then mandating them everywhere.