As a total monoglot who regrets not learning languages properly when he was a kid, this still seems pretty obvious to me that at least I don't read code in the

As a total monoglot who regrets not learning languages properly when he was a kid, this still seems pretty obvious to me that at least I don't read code in the way I read natural language, or maths. However it's always good to have intuitions like this confirmed or refuted by actual investigation, and putting them on a more solid footing within the broader context. My personal experience of reading code has always felt more like looking at a mechanical mechanism, or perhaps solving a paper maze where you see the whole thing at once but can focus on parts as well. It isn't something I look at one line at a time, I read it in structural blocks, almost a breadth-first reading. I see the if/else statement and structure before I see any of the details of each branch. It's a deeply non-linear process of going up and down levels of abstraction where necessary, and ignoring details at lower levels that are irrelevant to the task at hand.