For the last 6 years I use three colors for comments: https://i.imgur.com/vU783Xo_d.jpg?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&f...
If you have a configurable editor you can find more useful things to highlight in the code as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1w76um/comment...
This has slightly increased the number of comments overall and while I think quality has gone way up, I don’t want them more visible to the point of distraction.
Yep. Put me in the latter camp. If you made my comments more visable it would be highly distracting. Thinking about it like commentary is good because along with WHY comments over WHAT comments, I’ve been making an effort to describe INTENT for future readers (me).
- the 'supra-comments' are essentially used as "section headers", "block title / description", i.e. structural markers. It's thus logical to want them standing out, like titles in a text document or section borders in a spreadsheet.
- the 'infra-comments' are the "explicited subtext", "block/line anotation", i.e. substantive but secondary content (usually discussion about the code, which may also be externalized to a spec doc). These are naturally dimmed, because they sit beneath or outside the primary substance, the code (inline or aside, as in text documents and web pages, or even hidden behind a toggle).
In that regard, languages with two syntaxes for comments (eg. block "/* ... */" and end-of-line "// ...") may be formatted by editors respectively "standing out" and "dimmed", giving this two-level comment schema to the developer.
I personally think the 'supra-comment' / structural approach is detrimental to readability (longer, bloat, to me it's ASCII art however you want to spin it), and that problem should be solved by organizing code better (block order, files), choosing more self-explanatory names for everything, and having proper external documentation (however succint, it's not optional and can't be substituted by comments).
https://i.imgur.com/EKiVA0X.png
By the way @akkartik, it looks like your imgur link goes to the thumbnail rather than the image :)