I like fresh corn, in my wife's native Serbia it's still possible to get corn off the plant around the villages. I read in Roald Dahl's Cookbook that an American writer, maybe Mark Twain, once quipped that water should be boiling before you touch the plant to get the sweetest corn.
If I am going to cook corn over coals, and being the weirdo I am and overcomplicating things I like to first blanch it in water for a few minutes, then put it over coals, the idea being that the boiling denatures the enzymes which normally turn sugar into starch, so the sugar is retained better. Who knows. Sometimes we've had corn literally sweet as candy. No butter or anything, just a sprinkle of salt.