17 ms·

Code is not literature (2014)

112 points by setra 10y ago

quickoats 10y ago
literature feels also a lot like decoding science specimens, in the same sense in the article as to get at or understand the author's mind; i feel that code and 'literature' are the same. the reader of code plays the part of the compiler, computer, or conveyor. the reader of prose literature plays the part of spectator, character, or anything. these words too, is also code for our human computers to syntax-check and preprocess and accept/install or discard/patch.
daly 10y ago
Code is not literature the same way equations are not mathematics. Take any math or physics book, extract all of the equations, and throw away the text. That's how we write programs... just the equations. However, look at Physically Based Rendering (http://www.pbrt.org/ http://www.pbrt.org/). It won an Academy Award. It should win a Pulitzer. All of the actual source code is in the book and the book is quite readable. Or look at Lisp in Small Pieces (https://pages.lip6.fr/Christian.Queinnec/WWW/LiSP.html https://pages.lip6.fr/Christian.Queinnec/WWW/LiSP.html). There you will find a complete lisp system surrounded by enlightening text. Your confusion stems from the coding constraints of the 1970s. My first machine had 8k of memory, 4k of which was operating system. So programs could not exceed 4k, requiring #include statements. As programs grew they adopt the "pile of sand" (POS) format where the "meaningful" directory names like 'src', 'doc', 'test', etc contain the semantic content. Of course nobody reads POS code. It wasn't written to communicate to humans. It's the late 90s... code like humans matter, like your code needs to be understood, maintained, and modified. Write literate programs similar to Physically Based Rendering and Lisp in Small Pieces. Stop programming like your grandfather did. Oh, yeah, and write provable programs... but that's another rant.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  > Stop programming like your grandfather did. Actually those that had family members working at Burroughs, ETHZ, DEC, Xerox PARC, Texas Instruments or Genera, probably should start coding as their grandfather did. :)
- amelius 10y ago
  But I think rendering is a specific kind of programming problem that allows simple mathematical reasoning (even if the equations are complicated). To state it differently, information is only flowing one way, i.e. from the model to the display. Documenting a general computer program is much more involved.
- mpweiher 10y ago
  > Oh, yeah, and write provable programs Provable wrt to what specification?
- glangdale 10y ago
  I am rather conflicted to read this advice. I think we all want to do this; on the other hand, I think we also generally cannot afford the time to do it. In the project that I run, many major subsystems have been obsoleted by other algorithms, changes in the underlying hardware, etc. Every hour spent not writing beautiful literate code to communicate with other humans in these cases is an hour saved. And yet, and yet.
  - white-flame 10y ago
    Every hour saved in skipping code readability is 4 hours wasted later in trying to reverse engineer what the code author was doing. Discarding on-the-job code with no maintenance or bug-fixing is astonishingly rare. Even building different parts of a system often requires some code updates in other portions, even if it's not even executed yet. Also, writing your thoughts into concrete, descriptive comments helps you with rubber-duck debugging, often pointing out weaknesses or edge cases you didn't think of when you were heads-down in the code. It's far faster to fix issues that come up ahead of time than after you've swapped it out of mind.
    - otikik 10y ago
      I have been that second person many times and I agree completely with this comment. When you skip readability you are saving your own dev time at the expense of other future devs'.
      - sqeaky 10y ago
        That sounds like debt in time against the technical aspects of the system in question. If only we as an industry had some label for this Technical Debt so that we could appeal to practices like refactoring, unit tests and continuous integration to pay it down.
        vorg 10y ago
        All business is about borrowing stuff from the future -- getting as much gain as possible now and deferring the costs as far as possible into the future, when someone else needs to pay back the debt, or when it can be defaulted on. Business managers don't let tech workers spend time refactoring because it violates this basic business principle. They will make up some other positive-sounding label, e.g. Agile Development, and bandy that around instead. When the system's technical debt is called in, those managers will have already moved to another system to pull the same con, or they'll replace the system with a fresh one complete with green-card-seeking programmers. The programmers on the old system will be retrenched without payment via stack-ranking, and their health problems caused from stress and lack of sleep forgotten about.
- culturedsystems 10y ago
  I think the post does a good job of arguing against your position here (and thus of explaining why literate programming has been such a failure). Literate programming misunderstands what code is, and so misunderstands how we go about understanding code. Literate programming imagines code is like a book, i.e., something that we understand by contemplating it. The post argues (I think correctly), that code is more like an organism or a mechanism, which can best be understood by observing it in action, or by interacting with it.
- xyzzy_plugh 10y ago
  I've never heard "pile of sand" used to describe that layout before. I tried googling but it only brought me back to this post. Do you have any background on this term?
austincheney 10y ago
There are two schools of thought on this: it is and it isn't. For people who believe code isn't literature descriptive names are wasted characters. The biggest difference between code and literature is that code is structured where literature isn't (literature makes up for this with a flow like a plot). Explicit structures are things like subtypes and nested scopes, qualities that exist directly and not through inference or reference resolution. There are things that can be inferred directly from structures like context and scope. For these developers code can be less explicit and less wordy because they aren't reading code line by line and guessing at how the pieces come together. The code is literature camp represents an educated formalism. In the absence of explicit structures you need to understand what the code is doing by simply reading the code. The problem with the code is literature approach is that it is for humans only. The computer absolutely doesn't care, and so therefore it can be wrong or deceptive.
- mtrn 10y ago
  > For people who believe code isn't literature descriptive names are wasted characters. Data point: I do read code like books and I can't stand longAndMeaningful variable names. Rather, cut to the chase.
  - TuringTest 10y ago
    What do you do if you find a section of code that solves a problem that you have never seen before? How do you decide what it's supposed to do, and whether it is doing it right or it has a bug?
  - TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
    The chase being what? It takes no time at all to read a longAndMeaningful variable name, and no time at all to work out what it's doing. Assuming you don't name variables a1 to z256, calling a variable something like "items" makes it context dependent, which is a little too much like building state into the syntax. Long names provide an extra informal level of type safety. You should be able to see what a variable is doing by looking at it, and you should also be able to see that it provides a clean level of abstraction/composition instead of just being an arbitrary container with a label.
mpweiher 10y ago
There's a distinction I've noticed ever since university CS: The code-starers and the experimentalists. When debugging, the code-starers would, well, stare at the code and try to reason this out logically. There will be statements such as "this cannot be the case, because ...". The experimentalists would run the program with variations in input and code and observe the effects in order to figure out what was really happening. As you can probably tell, I am an experimentalist, and I find the code-staring approach puzzling: (a) the world is not as you expect it to be, so reasoning about what can or cannot be the case is of limited use, as your reasoning is evidently faulty (usually assumptions). (b) there is a real world you can ask questions, why would you not want real answers?? Philosophically and historically, I consider the move towards empirical science (Bacon etc.) probably the greatest advancement humanity has made to date. It certainly is dramatically more effective than any other method of separating truth from non-truth we have, whereas scholasticism...
- tskaiser 10y ago
  Experimenting and reasoning ("staring") solves two different problems: the "what" and the "why". Both are useful tools that can lift different tasks, and neither should be used to the exclusion of the other.
- greggyb 10y ago
  I think the experimentation helps identify the piece of code to stare at. Some people are just choosing staring at an earlier point than you are. As with anything, I think you can swing too far. I had one junior developer under me who would constantly try different things, but this person was not an experimenter. There was no hypothesis being tested or reasonable mental model that they were working against. It was just a painful-to-watch spew of ill-formed and poorly thought out code of questionable syntax. I tend to fall more on the experimenter side of things, but sometimes code staring is exactly the right approach.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  I'm a "code starer" that uses experiments to inform the "staring" phase. I look hard at the code, think to myself "this can't happen... unless", I formulate the hypothesis and then use experiments to prove/disprove it. While the shotgun approach to science (run random experiments and see what correlations fall out) can be useful at times, there's a benefit to figuring out precisely what you're looking for before you start looking.
ideonexus 10y ago
Seibel's observation that reading code is less like literature and more like science is dead on. No matter how readable the code is, when I'm confronted with 10,000 lines of it spread across numerous encapsulated functions, I must tackle it very differently from how I read prose. With a complex literary text, I can just read it in linear fashion with occasional segueing to look up words and concepts, with well-engineered code I must follow numerous cases into different flows of logic. These aren't the same at all. I appreciate that he's trying to dispel the idea that we "read" code as we read for pleasure, I learn from code by experimenting with it. I open up the debugger and step through it, watch the variables change and see where it goes when I execute it. Most of all, I learn by changing that code and trying to build on it. I have enhanced my javascript skills immensely in recent years by cloning various projects on github and trying to expand on them or adopt them to my own purposes. I don't recommend opening up a code base and just reading it, actively engage it, break it, and enhance it.
suchire 10y ago
Reading code may not be like reading literature, but I find writing code to be remarkably similar to writing prose. I wrote about that in more detail here: http://www.ericsuh.com/blog/posts/2016/01/writing-code.html http://www.ericsuh.com/blog/posts/2016/01/writing-code.html
- oddlyaromatic 10y ago
  You make good points there, I've proudly omitted so many needless words over the years.
henrik_w 10y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7091495 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7091495
oddlyaromatic 10y ago
Literature is not an inherent quality, for me. Literature (and art more broadly) is among other things a lens that humans look at statements and groups of statements through. There is no "Is this literature?", there is only "what happens when I treat this 'as literature'"? Is it useful to treat the complex interconnected statements in a codebase as literature? Yes, probably, to some people. For me music and plays both provide good structural references for me learning to code. It is occasionally useful to me to connect these things. But I also treat literature itself as a bit of a specimen as the author suggests- I want to know about a poem, what is b it, how does it work, w why is it this way and not some other way. I want to "run" a poem out loud and see what the sounds are. Some of the other comments point out that the literature idea doesn't work for all code. It probably helps if both the author and the reader buy in to the idea. But I can't get behind the idea that it's true to say "code isn't literature" when what seems to be the case is that literature is a thing we can do to texts, not a thing we must do. Code might be a genre of text? I don't know. But maybe the baby is being thrown out with the bathwater here.
eternalban 10y ago
Apropos of the Asimov's remarks, I find it rather sad that a literature major is completely ignoring that literature can only exist in a cultural context. Sans culture, written text is just that: written text, and there can be no "literature". And given that literature is 'machine code' for the 'psychological machine' of the Human 'reader', it should have been clear to OP from day 1 that if there is such a thing as "software as literature" it must be 'read' from the pov of Machine, SICP gods' notwithstanding. [edit]
ryandrake 10y ago
> Tl;dr: don’t start a code reading group. What you should start instead I’ll get to in a moment but first I need to explain how I arrived at my current opinion. Hmm.. Isn't the TL;DR supposed to be for readers who don't have that "moment" for you to get to the point?
- ljw1001 10y ago
  Blogs are also not literature, apparently. :) Otherwise they would merit more careful editing.
- nix0n 10y ago
  The tl;dr is just "don’t start a code reading group."
xyzzy4 10y ago
Reading code is more like figuring out all the plumbing of a large building.
ljw1001 10y ago
The author is looking at this from the perspective of someone who reads 'for fun' or generalized learning. When you have to maintain (or god forbid, rewrite) a module, you do a lot of code reading. At that point the more like reading a good essay it is, the better.
- ljw1001 10y ago
  I would take it one step further and say that a better analogy than collecting specimens would be that code-reading is like doing secondary research: Read an overview, dive down one path, take notes, find and read three more articles, etc.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
owenversteeg 10y ago
I think, just like writing, some code is meant to be read but most is produced as a fact of life. For example, of what I write in my daily life - emails, HN comments, papers, text messages... the majority aren't meant to be aesthetically pleasing at all. But occasionally I will write something, either on purpose or by accident, that's just a little bit poetic and nice. Or I'll sit down to write a story, or a blog post, or something that's meant to be a bit nicer to read. There's a continuum of how nicely things are written in real life: if you just crashed your car, you might text your family quickly telling them what happened. Or if the site went down, you might hack together a quick fix. That'll be utilitarian, since in a situation like that you don't give a damn about how well the text/code "flows". Then there's writing where you're not pressured for time, but you don't care about the style: most code people write is like this. Then finally there's code, and writing, that's intended to be beautiful. It's written with the intent of showing it to other people, and with the hope that someone will read it and say "wow". The reality, however, is that most code - and most writing - is merely utilitarian. And even when people -do- try to make their code (or writing) beautiful, they aren't skilled enough to do it. Hell, just because I _want_ to write like Márquez doesn't mean I can. There is code that is literature, but it's hard to find. It may be lost, written on a whiteboard in a job interview to impress the company. It may be hidden from the world, the author embarrassed by it. Or, it might be out there somewhere, but nobody's discovered it yet.
- Roboprog 10y ago
  To further extend that idea, you can lump code you (must?) read into 2 broad overgeneralizations: * An informative program that you will learn something (good) from. * A cryptic cipher (seemingly) that will only make your eyes bleed and your head ache. Just sayin'.
pards 10y ago
>> in order to grok it I have to essentially rewrite it That whole paragraph describes exactly how I go about learning sections of a new codebase. Rename stuff, pull out methods and classes, reformat etc until I have a few "a-ha" moments then I discard my changes and re-read the original with a little more enlightenment.
streambranch 10y ago
What came to my mind while reading this is code is closer to poetry than it is to 'literature'. Not a perfect analogy mind you but it shares these qualities: - It tends to be dense. - It is meant to be decoded. - The terms/words/commands/formatting are picked carefully to evoke concepts (and in poetry, feelings). This reminds me of something a friend said to me a long time ago about his lack of interest in crosswords: "If I want a good puzzle I read a poem." I've always approached other people's code as a puzzle.
streambranch 10y ago
What came to my mind while reading this is code is closer to poetry than it is to 'literature'. Not a perfect analogy mind you but it shares these qualities: - It tends to be dense. - It is meant to be decoded. - The terms/words/commands/formatting are picked carefully to evoke concepts (and in poetry, feelings). This reminds me of something a friend said to me a long time ago about his lack of interest in crosswords: "If I want a good puzzle I read a poem." I've always approached other people's code as a puzzle.

112 points by setra 10y ago

literature feels also a lot like decoding science specimens, in the same sense in the article as to get at or understand the author's mind; i feel that code and 'literature' are the same. the reader of code plays the part of the compiler, computer, or conveyor. the reader of prose literature plays the part of spectator, character, or anything. these words too, is also code for our human computers to syntax-check and preprocess and accept/install or discard/patch.

daly 10y ago

Code is not literature the same way equations are not mathematics. Take any math or physics book, extract all of the equations, and throw away the text. That's how we write programs... just the equations. However, look at Physically Based Rendering (http://www.pbrt.org/ http://www.pbrt.org/). It won an Academy Award. It should win a Pulitzer. All of the actual source code is in the book and the book is quite readable. Or look at Lisp in Small Pieces (https://pages.lip6.fr/Christian.Queinnec/WWW/LiSP.html https://pages.lip6.fr/Christian.Queinnec/WWW/LiSP.html). There you will find a complete lisp system surrounded by enlightening text. Your confusion stems from the coding constraints of the 1970s. My first machine had 8k of memory, 4k of which was operating system. So programs could not exceed 4k, requiring #include statements. As programs grew they adopt the "pile of sand" (POS) format where the "meaningful" directory names like 'src', 'doc', 'test', etc contain the semantic content. Of course nobody reads POS code. It wasn't written to communicate to humans. It's the late 90s... code like humans matter, like your code needs to be understood, maintained, and modified. Write literate programs similar to Physically Based Rendering and Lisp in Small Pieces. Stop programming like your grandfather did. Oh, yeah, and write provable programs... but that's another rant.

pjmlp 10y ago
> Stop programming like your grandfather did. Actually those that had family members working at Burroughs, ETHZ, DEC, Xerox PARC, Texas Instruments or Genera, probably should start coding as their grandfather did. :)
amelius 10y ago
But I think rendering is a specific kind of programming problem that allows simple mathematical reasoning (even if the equations are complicated). To state it differently, information is only flowing one way, i.e. from the model to the display. Documenting a general computer program is much more involved.
mpweiher 10y ago
> Oh, yeah, and write provable programs Provable wrt to what specification?
glangdale 10y ago
I am rather conflicted to read this advice. I think we all want to do this; on the other hand, I think we also generally cannot afford the time to do it. In the project that I run, many major subsystems have been obsoleted by other algorithms, changes in the underlying hardware, etc. Every hour spent not writing beautiful literate code to communicate with other humans in these cases is an hour saved. And yet, and yet.
- white-flame 10y ago
  Every hour saved in skipping code readability is 4 hours wasted later in trying to reverse engineer what the code author was doing. Discarding on-the-job code with no maintenance or bug-fixing is astonishingly rare. Even building different parts of a system often requires some code updates in other portions, even if it's not even executed yet. Also, writing your thoughts into concrete, descriptive comments helps you with rubber-duck debugging, often pointing out weaknesses or edge cases you didn't think of when you were heads-down in the code. It's far faster to fix issues that come up ahead of time than after you've swapped it out of mind.
  - otikik 10y ago
    I have been that second person many times and I agree completely with this comment. When you skip readability you are saving your own dev time at the expense of other future devs'.
    - sqeaky 10y ago
      That sounds like debt in time against the technical aspects of the system in question. If only we as an industry had some label for this Technical Debt so that we could appeal to practices like refactoring, unit tests and continuous integration to pay it down.
      - vorg 10y ago
        All business is about borrowing stuff from the future -- getting as much gain as possible now and deferring the costs as far as possible into the future, when someone else needs to pay back the debt, or when it can be defaulted on. Business managers don't let tech workers spend time refactoring because it violates this basic business principle. They will make up some other positive-sounding label, e.g. Agile Development, and bandy that around instead. When the system's technical debt is called in, those managers will have already moved to another system to pull the same con, or they'll replace the system with a fresh one complete with green-card-seeking programmers. The programmers on the old system will be retrenched without payment via stack-ranking, and their health problems caused from stress and lack of sleep forgotten about.
culturedsystems 10y ago
I think the post does a good job of arguing against your position here (and thus of explaining why literate programming has been such a failure). Literate programming misunderstands what code is, and so misunderstands how we go about understanding code. Literate programming imagines code is like a book, i.e., something that we understand by contemplating it. The post argues (I think correctly), that code is more like an organism or a mechanism, which can best be understood by observing it in action, or by interacting with it.
xyzzy_plugh 10y ago
I've never heard "pile of sand" used to describe that layout before. I tried googling but it only brought me back to this post. Do you have any background on this term?

austincheney 10y ago

There are two schools of thought on this: it is and it isn't. For people who believe code isn't literature descriptive names are wasted characters. The biggest difference between code and literature is that code is structured where literature isn't (literature makes up for this with a flow like a plot). Explicit structures are things like subtypes and nested scopes, qualities that exist directly and not through inference or reference resolution. There are things that can be inferred directly from structures like context and scope. For these developers code can be less explicit and less wordy because they aren't reading code line by line and guessing at how the pieces come together. The code is literature camp represents an educated formalism. In the absence of explicit structures you need to understand what the code is doing by simply reading the code. The problem with the code is literature approach is that it is for humans only. The computer absolutely doesn't care, and so therefore it can be wrong or deceptive.

mtrn 10y ago
> For people who believe code isn't literature descriptive names are wasted characters. Data point: I do read code like books and I can't stand longAndMeaningful variable names. Rather, cut to the chase.
- TuringTest 10y ago
  What do you do if you find a section of code that solves a problem that you have never seen before? How do you decide what it's supposed to do, and whether it is doing it right or it has a bug?
- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
  The chase being what? It takes no time at all to read a longAndMeaningful variable name, and no time at all to work out what it's doing. Assuming you don't name variables a1 to z256, calling a variable something like "items" makes it context dependent, which is a little too much like building state into the syntax. Long names provide an extra informal level of type safety. You should be able to see what a variable is doing by looking at it, and you should also be able to see that it provides a clean level of abstraction/composition instead of just being an arbitrary container with a label.

mpweiher 10y ago

There's a distinction I've noticed ever since university CS: The code-starers and the experimentalists. When debugging, the code-starers would, well, stare at the code and try to reason this out logically. There will be statements such as "this cannot be the case, because ...". The experimentalists would run the program with variations in input and code and observe the effects in order to figure out what was really happening. As you can probably tell, I am an experimentalist, and I find the code-staring approach puzzling: (a) the world is not as you expect it to be, so reasoning about what can or cannot be the case is of limited use, as your reasoning is evidently faulty (usually assumptions). (b) there is a real world you can ask questions, why would you not want real answers?? Philosophically and historically, I consider the move towards empirical science (Bacon etc.) probably the greatest advancement humanity has made to date. It certainly is dramatically more effective than any other method of separating truth from non-truth we have, whereas scholasticism...

tskaiser 10y ago
Experimenting and reasoning ("staring") solves two different problems: the "what" and the "why". Both are useful tools that can lift different tasks, and neither should be used to the exclusion of the other.
greggyb 10y ago
I think the experimentation helps identify the piece of code to stare at. Some people are just choosing staring at an earlier point than you are. As with anything, I think you can swing too far. I had one junior developer under me who would constantly try different things, but this person was not an experimenter. There was no hypothesis being tested or reasonable mental model that they were working against. It was just a painful-to-watch spew of ill-formed and poorly thought out code of questionable syntax. I tend to fall more on the experimenter side of things, but sometimes code staring is exactly the right approach.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
I'm a "code starer" that uses experiments to inform the "staring" phase. I look hard at the code, think to myself "this can't happen... unless", I formulate the hypothesis and then use experiments to prove/disprove it. While the shotgun approach to science (run random experiments and see what correlations fall out) can be useful at times, there's a benefit to figuring out precisely what you're looking for before you start looking.

ideonexus 10y ago

Seibel's observation that reading code is less like literature and more like science is dead on. No matter how readable the code is, when I'm confronted with 10,000 lines of it spread across numerous encapsulated functions, I must tackle it very differently from how I read prose. With a complex literary text, I can just read it in linear fashion with occasional segueing to look up words and concepts, with well-engineered code I must follow numerous cases into different flows of logic. These aren't the same at all. I appreciate that he's trying to dispel the idea that we "read" code as we read for pleasure, I learn from code by experimenting with it. I open up the debugger and step through it, watch the variables change and see where it goes when I execute it. Most of all, I learn by changing that code and trying to build on it. I have enhanced my javascript skills immensely in recent years by cloning various projects on github and trying to expand on them or adopt them to my own purposes. I don't recommend opening up a code base and just reading it, actively engage it, break it, and enhance it.

suchire 10y ago

Reading code may not be like reading literature, but I find writing code to be remarkably similar to writing prose. I wrote about that in more detail here: http://www.ericsuh.com/blog/posts/2016/01/writing-code.html http://www.ericsuh.com/blog/posts/2016/01/writing-code.html

oddlyaromatic 10y ago
You make good points there, I've proudly omitted so many needless words over the years.

henrik_w 10y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7091495 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7091495

oddlyaromatic 10y ago

Literature is not an inherent quality, for me. Literature (and art more broadly) is among other things a lens that humans look at statements and groups of statements through. There is no "Is this literature?", there is only "what happens when I treat this 'as literature'"? Is it useful to treat the complex interconnected statements in a codebase as literature? Yes, probably, to some people. For me music and plays both provide good structural references for me learning to code. It is occasionally useful to me to connect these things. But I also treat literature itself as a bit of a specimen as the author suggests- I want to know about a poem, what is b it, how does it work, w why is it this way and not some other way. I want to "run" a poem out loud and see what the sounds are. Some of the other comments point out that the literature idea doesn't work for all code. It probably helps if both the author and the reader buy in to the idea. But I can't get behind the idea that it's true to say "code isn't literature" when what seems to be the case is that literature is a thing we can do to texts, not a thing we must do. Code might be a genre of text? I don't know. But maybe the baby is being thrown out with the bathwater here.

eternalban 10y ago

Apropos of the Asimov's remarks, I find it rather sad that a literature major is completely ignoring that literature can only exist in a cultural context. Sans culture, written text is just that: written text, and there can be no "literature". And given that literature is 'machine code' for the 'psychological machine' of the Human 'reader', it should have been clear to OP from day 1 that if there is such a thing as "software as literature" it must be 'read' from the pov of Machine, SICP gods' notwithstanding. [edit]

ryandrake 10y ago

> Tl;dr: don’t start a code reading group. What you should start instead I’ll get to in a moment but first I need to explain how I arrived at my current opinion. Hmm.. Isn't the TL;DR supposed to be for readers who don't have that "moment" for you to get to the point?

ljw1001 10y ago
Blogs are also not literature, apparently. :) Otherwise they would merit more careful editing.
nix0n 10y ago
The tl;dr is just "don’t start a code reading group."

xyzzy4 10y ago

Reading code is more like figuring out all the plumbing of a large building.

ljw1001 10y ago

The author is looking at this from the perspective of someone who reads 'for fun' or generalized learning. When you have to maintain (or god forbid, rewrite) a module, you do a lot of code reading. At that point the more like reading a good essay it is, the better.

ljw1001 10y ago
I would take it one step further and say that a better analogy than collecting specimens would be that code-reading is like doing secondary research: Read an overview, dive down one path, take notes, find and read three more articles, etc.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

owenversteeg 10y ago

I think, just like writing, some code is meant to be read but most is produced as a fact of life. For example, of what I write in my daily life - emails, HN comments, papers, text messages... the majority aren't meant to be aesthetically pleasing at all. But occasionally I will write something, either on purpose or by accident, that's just a little bit poetic and nice. Or I'll sit down to write a story, or a blog post, or something that's meant to be a bit nicer to read. There's a continuum of how nicely things are written in real life: if you just crashed your car, you might text your family quickly telling them what happened. Or if the site went down, you might hack together a quick fix. That'll be utilitarian, since in a situation like that you don't give a damn about how well the text/code "flows". Then there's writing where you're not pressured for time, but you don't care about the style: most code people write is like this. Then finally there's code, and writing, that's intended to be beautiful. It's written with the intent of showing it to other people, and with the hope that someone will read it and say "wow". The reality, however, is that most code - and most writing - is merely utilitarian. And even when people -do- try to make their code (or writing) beautiful, they aren't skilled enough to do it. Hell, just because I _want_ to write like Márquez doesn't mean I can. There is code that is literature, but it's hard to find. It may be lost, written on a whiteboard in a job interview to impress the company. It may be hidden from the world, the author embarrassed by it. Or, it might be out there somewhere, but nobody's discovered it yet.

Roboprog 10y ago
To further extend that idea, you can lump code you (must?) read into 2 broad overgeneralizations: * An informative program that you will learn something (good) from. * A cryptic cipher (seemingly) that will only make your eyes bleed and your head ache. Just sayin'.

pards 10y ago

>> in order to grok it I have to essentially rewrite it That whole paragraph describes exactly how I go about learning sections of a new codebase. Rename stuff, pull out methods and classes, reformat etc until I have a few "a-ha" moments then I discard my changes and re-read the original with a little more enlightenment.

streambranch 10y ago

What came to my mind while reading this is code is closer to poetry than it is to 'literature'. Not a perfect analogy mind you but it shares these qualities: - It tends to be dense. - It is meant to be decoded. - The terms/words/commands/formatting are picked carefully to evoke concepts (and in poetry, feelings). This reminds me of something a friend said to me a long time ago about his lack of interest in crosswords: "If I want a good puzzle I read a poem." I've always approached other people's code as a puzzle.

streambranch 10y ago