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> because when you are reading you have to waste time thinking about why the programmer chose the set of features he did to write the code. It seems to me that
by kevinr 11y ago
> because when you are reading you have to waste time thinking about why the programmer chose the set of features he did to write the code.
It seems to me that what Pike is getting at here is how easy it is to build mental models of the code, the language, the underlying system, down through all its layers, and, yes, the code's original author and any subsequent authors.
I share your frustration at the subjectivity of readability claims. There's actually starting to be good academic research on code readability, for instance this paper:
https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~weimer/p/weimer-tse2010-readability-preprint.pdf https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~weimer/p/weimer-tse2010-readabi...
- kevinr 11y agoOh, or this investigation into programming language syntax for learnability! > Recent studies in the literature have shown that syntax remains a significant barrier to novice computer science students in the field. While this syntax barrier is known to exist, whether and how it varies across programming languages has not been carefully investigated. For this article, we conducted four empirical studies on programming language syntax as part of a larger analysis into the, so called, programming language wars. http://neverworkintheory.org/2014/01/29/stefik-siebert-syntax.html http://neverworkintheory.org/2014/01/29/stefik-siebert-synta...