I think that's a very good point and it seems to me the spirit of that argument is "write code that is so clean that it doesn't need comments." Or the inverse of that could be "if your code needs a lot of comments then it probably isn't very clean."
So I think that is a good mentality in as much as it keeps you thinking and writing clean code. But, I think it's also rather presumptuous to assume everything will be clear to others. Also as you say - once you've had to stick around and maintain a few applications, you really appreciate a thoughtful programmer who put in some comments that saved you a few hours. And you start to loath the rock-star who came in for 6 months and wrote a bunch of code using the fad-of-the-moment design pattern without commenting anything.
So I think that is a good mentality in as much as it keeps you thinking and writing clean code. But, I think it's also rather presumptuous to assume everything will be clear to others. Also as you say - once you've had to stick around and maintain a few applications, you really appreciate a thoughtful programmer who put in some comments that saved you a few hours. And you start to loath the rock-star who came in for 6 months and wrote a bunch of code using the fad-of-the-moment design pattern without commenting anything.