Amen to readability, and a double-plus-amen to comments.

You need *both*.

I've been in the unfortunate position of having a boss who considered comments nothing but time-wasting fluff. He reprimanded me for puttting *too many* comments. 🙂

Three months later commenting was a best practice at that company. I like to think I had some small part in that...

Seriously, nicely formatted code makes the intent clearer. Correctly indenting code makes the intent of the code clearer. Comments explain the intent.

What part of clear code and explanation of intent is bad?

I also have had to come in after other programmers and take on huge projects that liked to use X, Y, I, Amount, etc as variable names. Yuck.

I'll say it again. Clarity of code = clarity of purpose. Comments = explanation of intent. This is not something anyone should be debating. The *hows*, yes. Not the *if*.