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There's nothing unreadable (and certainly nothing obscure conceptually) about 'Box<>'. It's just unfamiliar if you don't know Rust. But we'll get nowhere fast c

There's nothing unreadable (and certainly nothing obscure conceptually) about 'Box<>'. It's just unfamiliar if you don't know Rust. But we'll get nowhere fast confusing readability with familiarity. I'd be interested to know if anyone has done interesting conceptual and/or empirical work on readability. It seems like a very slippery and difficult concept to me. Readable to whom? Readable in the small or the large?

HorstG 7y ago
Readability and familiarity are not the same but closely related. There is nothing inherently more or less readable in the rust or haskell tree example. I think there is work on "readability", just in another context: Its called typography and orthography. And I think the gist of it is: Do it like everybody else does, first and foremost, strange and unfamiliar equals unreadable.
- crispinb 7y ago
  > I think there is work on "readability", just in another context: Its called typography and orthography. I think that's a very different case. Maybe some analogies might be drawn between some of that work and some of the lower-level aspects of reading code (related to syntax noise etc), but code readability, if it's a defensible concept at all, is a far more complex and layered phenomenon than letter & word recognition. The first thing a researcher would need to establish is whether or not readability even exists as a natural kind apart from familiarity. I don't know the field, so this might already have been pursued somewhere.
the_af 7y ago
> There's nothing unreadable [...] it's just unfamiliar if you don't know Rust Agreed. Note the same applies to Haskell's syntax :) People confuse "readable" with "based in my knowledge of Java and C, I can't make head or tails of this notation without reading a tutorial first", which in my opinion is not a sensible conclusion.
- crispinb 7y ago
  It's not entirely sensible, but it is understandable. I don't think most programmers are truly aware of how much they know, and how deeply automatic their recognition of programming constructs has become.

HorstG 7y ago

Readability and familiarity are not the same but closely related. There is nothing inherently more or less readable in the rust or haskell tree example. I think there is work on "readability", just in another context: Its called typography and orthography. And I think the gist of it is: Do it like everybody else does, first and foremost, strange and unfamiliar equals unreadable.

crispinb 7y ago
> I think there is work on "readability", just in another context: Its called typography and orthography. I think that's a very different case. Maybe some analogies might be drawn between some of that work and some of the lower-level aspects of reading code (related to syntax noise etc), but code readability, if it's a defensible concept at all, is a far more complex and layered phenomenon than letter & word recognition. The first thing a researcher would need to establish is whether or not readability even exists as a natural kind apart from familiarity. I don't know the field, so this might already have been pursued somewhere.

the_af 7y ago

> There's nothing unreadable [...] it's just unfamiliar if you don't know Rust Agreed. Note the same applies to Haskell's syntax :) People confuse "readable" with "based in my knowledge of Java and C, I can't make head or tails of this notation without reading a tutorial first", which in my opinion is not a sensible conclusion.

crispinb 7y ago
It's not entirely sensible, but it is understandable. I don't think most programmers are truly aware of how much they know, and how deeply automatic their recognition of programming constructs has become.