Nobody said it was hard to read. The comic you're replying to certainly didn't say that. I disagree that you could look at Google's source code and know much a

Nobody said it was hard to read. The comic you're replying to certainly didn't say that. I disagree that you could look at Google's source code and know much about the data center. You would have to have a lot more knowledge about infrastructure which is completely hidden from you. And that's about where we are with proteins. We can figure out the protein, and then try to simulate what it would do, but it's not easy or straight forward. So your analogy with Google source code would be like, you could simulate what a data center might be like, but you're just guessing and could be way off. I think the point of the comic is that if you look at Google source code, it's NOT straight forward to understand. You can read it, sure. Anyone can read an operating system worth of assembly, too. But knowing what it does, that's a hard problem (without running it). And that Google's code is only a few years of optimization by people trying to keep the code comprehensible instead of billions of years of optimization with no care for readability or organization.