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I've seen those types of comments everywhere, but only with "junior" devs, or more likely, from people without a CS background. Often these folks haven't had much exposure to clean production code or dug through open source libraries. They're trying to be helpful and document but don't really have the mental models of what needs to be commented or not. This is easy to train away though, through showing examples of what I think needs commenting, or straight up deleting comments during code reviews and by adding Docstrings instead of inline comments.

To be clear, I agree with you about how comments should be used.

> but I personally have never seen it.

I have.

That said, I think we are on the same position on the issue. When I've seen such comments, it's when someone that didn't understand the value if comments is responding to a request to ask them.

Thus is not necessarily because they are being deliberately obtuse, but because they never really experienced helpful comments. To me, 90% of the time a good comment wont say what's happening, instead it will say WHY it is happening. If good coding practised makes the code itself clear, good coding practice makes the context the code is written in clear.

But for those new, and/or those too use to a particular codebase or just never exposed to good comments, they wont get it, and when asked to do one (either as a general request or in a code review) the strawman is what you get (usually not as ridiculous as this example, but equally useless).

I see it as a cycle when learn to code: first we find comments useless so we skip them where we can. Then thus becomes normal, so we are used to seeing no or only useless comments. Then one day we look at code that we know we were confused on before but have forgotten why. On the N-th time of this, we leave the one line comment that says the secret. On the N plus one-th time, we read that comment and are enlightened. We then spend years trying to figure out the magic behind a useful and a useless comment, and arguing with those who think only useless comments exist.

So you are working with experienced people. It looks I don't have such luck, I have to look at lots of junior code.

Juniors think that they should write comments and then they waste time writing epic descriptions of trivial things. They waste time writing whole story of creating simple piece of code in one commit message. They waste time deliberating if tabs are better than spaces.

My personal anecdotal evidence is that they are not junior in the organizational chart. I'm just a contractor. They are a part of the company. Who am I to tell them they shouldn't comment "what" and "how" after every line they write?

This job made me hate inline comments. If I were to ever create a new language, I'd insist in there being no way to write comments in the same line as executable code.

>In my multiple decades of programming I have never seen anybody write a blatantly redundant comment like that. It's not "most of the time" that people comment like that, in my experience it's never.

While I share your dislike for this counterargument, it's certainly not never for me. Not even close. In my last job, I was dealing with code that had been in development for 15-20 years. We started a project to clean up the codebase. I would randomly browse people's commits. A fair amount of cleanup involved removing exactly those types of comments.

>Programmers have a job to do, and in my experience generally do not waste their time using comments to "restate obvious things and think it's a good comment".

Try working on a code base developed by engineers who are not trained in programming.

Agreed, I’ve never seen this sort of super redundant comments either in any real production code. I’ve only seen it in a small number of times in a handful of scripts written by interns.

> In my multiple decades of programming I have never seen anybody write a blatantly redundant comment like that.

You're simply insanely lucky!

multiple decades and you haven’t seen this? i’m floored. i see it all the time.