The Importance of Code Comments and Documentation: A Pillar of Software Engineering Throughout my professional life, I have encountered thousands upon thousands of lines of code with no comments at all. A growing number of developers today believe that code comments and documentation are outdated practices, relics of an earlier era in programming. Some argue that well-written code should be self-documenting and that comments are redundant or even misleading. While there is some merit to the idea of writing expressive, clean code, the notion that comments and documentation are unnecessary is seriously flawed. It disregards one of the foundational principles of software engineering: abstraction . Abstraction and the Role of Comments In software engineering, abstraction is the purposeful hiding of certain details of a system in order to highlight others. According to Liskov and Guttag (2001), abstraction simplifies systems by modeling complex be...