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Comments also lie.

At best, they are a statement that, at the time they were last edited, the author believed their stated facts were true, or might become so, plenty are aspirational, "this is what this function or change to it, which I've not yet written, will do".

He might have been wrong, or the code might have changed without updating the comment, the actual running code is the only truth.

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I find that comments at the top of functions are helpful when implementing an algorithm found in reference material, especially if they have a citation. At least that way you can check that the function appears to do what the reference material specifies.

But generally commit messages, descriptive symbols, simple logic, short functions, and unit tests are better.

To some degree I agree, but even if they don't lie they can still get in the way of code reading given the current sad state of code typography. If comments were handled better, I bet they would be updated more regularly with code changes since it would be more of an eye sore if they weren't.

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