alt Hacker NewsThat's not entirely true. Ideally, there would be a follow up with a reflection API.
Also, comments are syntax and they're mostly meaningless. By your reasoning, programming languages should have no comments.
So, it's not really a qualitative issue (presence of meaningless syntax) but a quantitative one (presence of lots of parsing complexity).
If you say that whatever data is put there doesn't matter at all, the one thing you definitely cannot ever do later is give it meaning.