> it seems strange that the author EVER thought that no comments should ever be needed That was a trend many years ago when people started seeing how comments

> it seems strange that the author EVER thought that no comments should ever be needed That was a trend many years ago when people started seeing how comments are often out-of-date, sometimes been copied pasted around so many times it's not even saying anything useful about the code next to it, and sometimes the author is just a bad writer and makes it more confusing than the code itself. So people became pissed off and kind of decided that the code needs to be clear enough to be self-documenting: short functions with verbose names, good variable names etc. making comments unnecessary. I do agree with that, but IMHO there's still a place for comments: as many others are saying: when you need to document why something has been written that way, not just what (which the code should be able to tell by itself)... and I believe OP is also claiming that, and you appear to be missing this context.