I've never been a fan of comments, and tend to view them as crutches.

Oh, to be young again... ;-)

When I was younger than I am now, I had the same condescending attitude that you do towards people who comment lightly or not at all.

But then I learned from painful experience (and advice from wiser programmers) that comments have about as many bugs as code when first written, but only the bugs in code get caught, and going forward only the code is maintained. Therefore in maintainance programming, don't trust comments.

But if the maintainance programmer ignores your comments, then attempting to make bad code OK by adding comments is worse than useless. You may get warm fuzzies from having the comments, but the energy would have been better spent making the code better...

So because some programmers aren't bright enough to maintain their code properly (which includes comments), comments aren't as useful?

Can you (with a straight face) seriously make that argument and say the flexibility of Perl is good in the same sentence?

Obviously if comments are poorly written, and poorly maintained they're not going to help. Same with poorly written and poorly maintained Perl code, but you don't see us stop using Perl do you?