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What does code readability mean?

typicalprogrammer.com

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Re: What does code readability mean?

#111

Post by steveklabnik »

dbcurtis wrote: post #90
jeremiep wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simplicity is about the cognitive overhead to understand code, the simpler it is the less effort it requires to reason about. That doesn't mean you don't have to learn anything to understand it. Going the easy route usually means dumbing down things and while it can help reading in the moment it definitely doesn't help in the long run as the code evolve over time.

I agree. Idiom plays a huge role. Example: Python list and dictionary comprehensions can often make the result clear much more easily and succictly than the equivalent loop. But you have to learn Python comprehensions, and the common idioms. And it is possible to take it too far, and write an overly-complicated and obtuse comprehension that is difficult to reason about. The goal should be code that is easy to reason…

We chose a lot of Rust's syntax to be familiar to those who use "curly brace and semicolon" languages, and some stuff from functional languages. It's not really about brevity.

Re: What does code readability mean?

#112

Post by wtetzner »

dbcurtis wrote: post #90
jeremiep wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simplicity is about the cognitive overhead to understand code, the simpler it is the less effort it requires to reason about. That doesn't mean you don't have to learn anything to understand it. Going the easy route usually means dumbing down things and while it can help reading in the moment it definitely doesn't help in the long run as the code evolve over time.

I agree. Idiom plays a huge role. Example: Python list and dictionary comprehensions can often make the result clear much more easily and succictly than the equivalent loop. But you have to learn Python comprehensions, and the common idioms. And it is possible to take it too far, and write an overly-complicated and obtuse comprehension that is difficult to reason about. The goal should be code that is easy to reason…

> But still, it looks like Rust values screen real estate over readabilty, which is a misguided optimization IMHO.

If that were true, I suspect it would look a lot more like ML and a lot less like C.

Re: What does code readability mean?

#113

Post by Alex3917 »

JamesBarney wrote: post #110
gregjor wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point, I agree with everything you wrote. I didn't intend to compare code language style to literature, maybe I failed to make that clear. I tried to make the more subtle comparison that some programmers react reflexively to code that doesn't look familiar to them and call it unreadable, the same way that a person unfamiliar with Shakespeare and unprepared (or unwilling) to make the effort to read it will dismis…

Good writing is not necessarily readable writing. Shakespearean works are good writing, but they are most certainly not easily readable. There is code that is great code because for many other reasons than readability.(Like performance, correctness, robustness) Easy to read writing is simple and concrete. Code that is easy to understand is also simple and concrete. Complexity and abstraction push away understanding l…

> they are most certainly not easily readable

They would have been easy to understand by folks who were alive at the time they were written when performed on stage. The only unfamiliar words would have been the ones he coined, but most of those were easy cognates from latin. If Shakespeare wrote the same works today then he'd be a terrible writer.

Re: What does code readability mean?

#114

Post by palakchokshi »

public class A

{

   private int exid;

   private string M;

   public A()

   {

      M = "The result is:";

   }

   public string y(int u, int v)

   {

      return M + (u+v).ToString();

   }
}

public static void Main()

{

   Console.WriteLine(new A().y(1,3));
}

Now add hundreds of lines of such code and you'll get unreadable code. It is not in the eyes of the reader, some code is just unreadable.

This is an extreme example though.

Re: What does code readability mean?

#115

Post by ken »

gregjor wrote: post #95
ken wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that software and literature are inherently different, but I do agree that this post tries to stretch this metaphor beyond its limits. The first 4 of 6 proposed meanings of "unreadable" are some variant of "It's objectively fine but I don't happen to like it". I wonder if his experience is one where one sees a lot of high-quality but foreign-looking source code. The article says: "By analogy, plenty of…

I can tell you my experience. I see a lot of foreign code, since I work almost exclusively on legacy code (not necessarily old, just not supported by the original developers). Some I would call low quality, most not that bad. I have to spend time and effort understanding the code, even the code I would call high quality. I get my customers after their original developers have gone, and after multiple other programmer…

It's useful to hear about your background, and based on your article, it's not too surprising. I'm beginning to believe that there's no such thing as a "typical" programmer (no offense!). I know people who write software for aerospace, political dissidents, major web services, healthcare, weekend hackathons, embedded systems, etc., and all of these have completely different kinds of requirements.

Brooks' book is on my shelf (it's one of the N=1 cases!), but I've come to the realization that I'm the only one who actually believes what he says. More than one manager has had it sitting on their desk when they told my team "This project is at risk of running late, so we're adding some additional people..." Never have I ever worked for a manager who agreed to implement anything in it.

Conceptual integrity is an attribute we really have no metrics for (AFAIK), which means it will naturally suffer as a project grows. That's probably why so many managers have no problem sacrificing it for short-term speed. It's a tragedy of the commons. You get credit for adding features, and for creating a new project to replace an old one, but you never see the downside from the gradual removal of conceptual integrity which caused the creation of the replacement project in the first place.

It's also a dramatic difference from literature. When George R. R. Martin is late with the next "Game of Thrones" volume, nobody suggests adding more authors to hit an arbitrary deadline. We'd rather let the schedule slip by a few years than sacrifice any conceptual integrity.

Re: What does code readability mean?

#116

Post by vec »

virgilp wrote: post #106
vec wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Which is the better painting, Van Gogh's Starry Night or Seurat's La Grande Jatee ?" is a deeply subjective question. "Which is the better painting, Van Gogh's Starry Night or a kindergartener's watercolor of their family?", on the other hand, appears to have a correct answer. There are multiple competing definitions of "simple" with respect to code and multiple kinds of simplicity that often have to be traded off a…

In your first example, both are exceptional, so really "which is better" is irrelevant. In the second, the difference is so big that it's obvious for anyone which is better, but that still doesn't make it useful for getting better at painting. "Paint more like a Van Gogh and less like a kindergarten kid" is not useful advice. People do have art critics and manuals that attempt to write down exactly what made Van Gogh…

Maybe I read too much into your original comment, but it reminded me of a pitfall that I see too many engineering types fall into, namely that because something can't be formalized then it must be arbitrary, unimportant, or both. In particular, this seems like a counterproductive way to frame the issue:

> If I have no objective criteria, then it must be subjective, and then all that "simple" means is that "this is easiest for me right now"

Here's a few other (actionble) things that "simple" can mean.

    * seems to reliably be easiest for me every time I look at it
    * was judged to be better by the three or four people I could get to give me an opinion
    * follows a heuristic that a bunch of smart people all seem to agree generally makes things better
    * mirrors whatever we did on this project the last time we were in this situation
Even if all it means is "easiest for me right now", that's still probably going to get better results than "the first thing that popped into my head that might work".

There is no objective definition of simple. On behalf of the maintenance programmers of the world, please don't take that to mean it's not worth trying anyway.

Re: What does code readability mean?

#117

Post by dbcurtis »

steveklabnik wrote: post #111
dbcurtis wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Idiom plays a huge role. Example: Python list and dictionary comprehensions can often make the result clear much more easily and succictly than the equivalent loop. But you have to learn Python comprehensions, and the common idioms. And it is possible to take it too far, and write an overly-complicated and obtuse comprehension that is difficult to reason about. The goal should be code that is easy to reason…

We chose a lot of Rust's syntax to be familiar to those who use "curly brace and semicolon" languages, and some stuff from functional languages. It's not really about brevity.

Fair enough. I get twitchy-semicolon-pinky when I switch back and forth between Python and C. I have much sympathy for Python core devs... I don't really do C++ because most of my C is embedded real-time, so dynamic data structures are not a thing, out of an abundance of conservatism. If I did C++, I'm sure I'd find Rust less jarring.

My excitement about Rust is mainly the potential for using Rust for embedded real time -- but I see microcontrollers are still 3rd tier support. It seems like Rust the language is directed at exactly that problem, but Rust's build system and overall ecosystem are not embedded-aware, unless there is plan for xargo to get tier 1 support?

So... this isn't the thread for it but I have to ask... the only Rust reference I've seen to list/hash comprehensions is somebody who did a macro. So... is that the idiomatic way to do a list comprehension in Rust? Or is Rust going to make comprehensions first-class syntax? It seems to me that if it can be done in a macro, it isn't a big leap to make it part of the language.

Re: What does code readability mean?

#118

Post by unabst »

virgilp wrote: post #15

> “Good code is simple” doesn’t actually say anything. [...] What we call “simple” depends on our experience, skills, interest, patience, and curiosity. I like Rich Hickey's stance on this: "simple" is objective (antonym: "complex"), whereas "easy" is subjective (antonym: "hard"). Easy depends on skills, interest, patience, curiosity - but simple does not. Simple is about lack of intertwining of concerns. About writi…

I've understood "simple" in coding to mean "with the fewest abstractions possible."

This. Is. Hard.

It does help when the language is simpler. But as I code, when I find the need to deal with more exceptions, more functions, and more words just to get something to work... I just assume I should do it differently.

Unfortunately, that's most of the time I spend coding.

Re: What does code readability mean?

#119

Post by FLUX-YOU »

virgilp wrote: post #15

> “Good code is simple” doesn’t actually say anything. [...] What we call “simple” depends on our experience, skills, interest, patience, and curiosity. I like Rich Hickey's stance on this: "simple" is objective (antonym: "complex"), whereas "easy" is subjective (antonym: "hard"). Easy depends on skills, interest, patience, curiosity - but simple does not. Simple is about lack of intertwining of concerns. About writi…

Simple code is usually what you have before exception handling, logging, and robustness.

Re: What does code readability mean?

#120

Post by steveklabnik »

dbcurtis wrote: post #117
steveklabnik wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We chose a lot of Rust's syntax to be familiar to those who use "curly brace and semicolon" languages, and some stuff from functional languages. It's not really about brevity.

Fair enough. I get twitchy-semicolon-pinky when I switch back and forth between Python and C. I have much sympathy for Python core devs... I don't really do C++ because most of my C is embedded real-time, so dynamic data structures are not a thing, out of an abundance of conservatism. If I did C++, I'm sure I'd find Rust less jarring. My excitement about Rust is mainly the potential for using Rust for embedded real t…

The plan is still to "unfork" xargo, that is, to put its functionality in Cargo. We'll see how long that takes. Many people are advocating for 2018 to be focused on embedded in some way, so we'll see!

I'd imagine most people reach for iterators when it comes to list comprehensions. If the crate gets popular enough, there might be a thing, but I don't even know the name of the crate you're talking about, so I don't think it is.

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