One place I worked required a comment for every line of code
/* assign 1 to a */
a = 1;
This is worse than no comments
With good variable naming and clearly-named functions little commenting is necessary ... who'm I kidding .. we still see shit like this
int NumObjs;
Is this a count? An index? An offset? Why are letters omitted? What type is the object? Nobody should ever use a name like "number" and everything should be fully spelled out except maybe supremely obvious abbreviations like Info for Information.
But omitting letters is ... cute.
In onee group I worked in at Microsoft we had API that were always fully spelled out; DM_MeteringInitialize(...). Then one guy implemented a secure clock (so people couldn't defeat a timeout by changing the system clock) and wrote
DM_SecClk...
WHY.
Comments should be at the block level, explaining what a block is doing; having a comment black atop every slf-documenting function is just compulsive.