Was talking to a colleague, friend and mentor Troy Bourgeois and in the course of the conversation he said something that struck me. He said writing code comments is just another form of repeating yourself.

I’ve been thinking about this all night. Just like copied code is a symptom of not getting the abstraction right, commenting is a symptom of not getting the code right. Code is supposed to communicate its intent. If it doesn't, then you comment in order to do so.

The real question here is why I feel like I have to add a disclaimer every time I say commenting is a smell? Whether it’s in front of college students, professionals or colleagues. I truly believe that the desire to write a comment is a sign that your code doesn’t communicate effectively, but I guess I fear that people will not strive to write code that doesn’t need comments and rather just omit them.

As Uncle Bob said:
It's not about _omitting_ comments, it's about making them unnecessary.