I once had to update an ancient Visual Basic 4 (yes, that is not a typo) application. The code had gone through many versions and was littered with comments about what each function did and much more besides. There were way more comments than actual code. Very daunting to read for the first time.
***BUT*** when it came to doing the update, those comments made all the difference and helped enormously. I learned a lot from that ancient programmer. And that project is the reason that these days, when I spend more than(say) 10 minutes struggling to get a statement just right I often add a comment so that the next person won't have to figure it out all over again (that person could well be me a few months later). Clever one-liners are fine for a one-off throw-away situation (and oh so satisfying), but for code that must run over and over again, comments are more important than elegance.