Comments are more important than code (Jef Raskin)
acmqueue.org
acmqueue.org
The prototypical one-line comment immediately before a line of code is often superfluous---a sign of a missing function, or the need for introducing a more descriptive variable binding. In contrast, more extensive documentation comments, operating at a higher level of abstraction than the one-liners, do fill an essential role by providing motivation and context.
Whether documentation is "more important" than code is debatable, but surely many pieces of nice code suffer for lack of decent documentation.