What does code readability mean?
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What does code readability mean?
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Re: What does code readability mean?
#2This is a thought-provoking and well-written blog post about programmer biases when it comes to reading, and judging, other people's code.
The author is making the point that code readability is ultimately in the eye of the beholder. I've come to share the author's views, and I have to say I don't hear it said much in programming culture. At most places I've worked, there's this culture of constant refactoring under the guise of "continuous improvement," when really, if you look closely, it's really motivated out of disdain for the last developer's programming style, and in my opinion, a general aversion to reading code.
Reading code is about 10x as hard as writing it. It takes more concentration, it's less fun, it's harder, and it doesn't impress anyone. You have to know the language better than the person who wrote it, because not only do you have to understand why the code does what they intended it to, but you also have to understand why the code does other things they didn't intend (a.k.a. bugs). But in my experience, you save your team a lot more time and energy in the long run by preferring to read and understand existing code.
Re: What does code readability mean?
#3> By analogy, plenty of people find reading Homer, Shakespeare, or Nabokov difficult and challenging, but we don’t say “Macbeth is unreadable.”
What of Joyce's Ulysses?
The thing is, most authors do put considerable effort into readability, because it helps you get read, published and paid. There's an interesting parallel with this article - writer:programmer :: critique group:code review.
> Programmers, prone to investing their ego in their code, worry about criticism from a lot of people they don’t know. Slurs about competency abound in programmer forums. Code samples out of context get critiqued and subjected to stylistic nit-picking. That process can prove helpful for programmers with thick skins who can interpret criticism as either useful mentoring or useless insults. Less experienced programmers can get misled and brow-beaten. Public code reviews create a kind of programmer performance art, when programmers write code to impress other programmers, or to avoid withering criticism from self-appointed experts
s/programmer/author and it still holds. As does much of the rest of the article.
I would say that programmer education really does underplay reading code. Students are taught to write small pieces and may never be shown a large novel-sized lump of code unless they go looking for it.
Re: What does code readability mean?
#4This is a thought-provoking and well-written blog post about programmer biases when it comes to reading, and judging, other people's code. The author is making the point that code readability is ultimately in the eye of the beholder. I've come to share the author's views, and I have to say I don't hear it said much in programming culture. At most places I've worked, there's this culture of constant refactoring under…
There is a lot the context you’ve built up in writing that code that could never fit in the comments (even if thoughts could easily be expressed in words, they would dwarf the code and not directly correspond to it; actually comments can actually make code reading harder in this way). It really isn’t about the language either, at least the programming language, but how the problem was defined and understood in the first place, how this understanding was encoded in the software.
Reading code is basically trying to reverse engineer the thinking of the programmer by looking at second order output. Of course it will be hard! It isn’t just style, nor would I say mainly just style. Continuous improvement is often just a matter of rebuilding the context that was lost with the last programmer.
Re: What does code readability mean?
#5There is often a world of a difference between code hard to read because it tries to solve a complex problem or is written in a paradigm I haven't learned yet, and code hard to read, because its author was just plain sloppy, and didn't properly care about naming or decomposition. Distinguishing between these two cases is a matter of enough experience.
Re: What does code readability mean?
#6This is a fantastic post that asks a question that I think many people just jump over on their way to "being right".
What exactly does the thing we are talking about mean?
In this case "code readability".
I would add to this that "code readability" only means something to me in the context of it's intended audience. Code is readable when it is simple to decipher by the people that the author intended to decipher it. For anyone else to hold it to standards outside of those agreed upon by the author and the intended audience seems silly.
Re: What does code readability mean?
#7This is a thought-provoking and well-written blog post about programmer biases when it comes to reading, and judging, other people's code. The author is making the point that code readability is ultimately in the eye of the beholder. I've come to share the author's views, and I have to say I don't hear it said much in programming culture. At most places I've worked, there's this culture of constant refactoring under…
Totally agree. It's a lot of work though and can be humbling to find out that the previous people weren't complete idiots.
Reading code also doesn't really get rewarded. It's easier to declare the work of people who aren't there anymore as bad and rewrite everything.
Re: What does code readability mean?
#8This is a thought-provoking and well-written blog post about programmer biases when it comes to reading, and judging, other people's code. The author is making the point that code readability is ultimately in the eye of the beholder. I've come to share the author's views, and I have to say I don't hear it said much in programming culture. At most places I've worked, there's this culture of constant refactoring under…
The biases are real, but readability is perhaps less of an ultimate concern than maintainability and reusability. Both of these depend on the ability of yourself (and others) being able to understand and adapt the code. A bit of foresight in making the life of future you (or colleague) easier goes a long way. Technical debt is real too and the interest can be high.
Re: What does code readability mean?
#9This is a fantastic post that asks a question that I think many people just jump over on their way to "being right". What exactly does the thing we are talking about mean? In this case "code readability". I would add to this that "code readability" only means something to me in the context of it's intended audience. Code is readable when it is simple to decipher by the people that the author intended to decipher it.…
A problem arises, if there exists no group of people that the author had in mind when writing the code. Some programmers really just code "so that it works" and don't care about readability at all. That's why we have code reviews - a code review is an attempt to read the code. If at least one reviewer understood the code, then we can assume it was not completely unreadable.
Re: What does code readability mean?
#10This is a thought-provoking and well-written blog post about programmer biases when it comes to reading, and judging, other people's code. The author is making the point that code readability is ultimately in the eye of the beholder. I've come to share the author's views, and I have to say I don't hear it said much in programming culture. At most places I've worked, there's this culture of constant refactoring under…
The biases are real, but readability is perhaps less of an ultimate concern than maintainability and reusability. Both of these depend on the ability of yourself (and others) being able to understand and adapt the code. A bit of foresight in making the life of future you (or colleague) easier goes a long way. Technical debt is real too and the interest can be high.
I would say that readability is a facet of maintainability. If a good developer looks at code the first time and thinks, "WTF," it could use some better readability. That's about as nailed down as I can make it (because it's so objective).