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By the second paragraph (not counting the introductory quotes), I had the uneasy feeling that the author was basing this essay on a restricted, and not very rel

By the second paragraph (not counting the introductory quotes), I had the uneasy feeling that the author was basing this essay on a restricted, and not very relevant, concept of readability. When I read code, or any other highly technical prose[1], I am trying to get into the mindset of the author: what problem are they attempting to solve here, and how did they envision this code advancing that purpose? What must one assume about the problem and the author's solution in order to be persuaded that it will be successful? If this sounds too hand-wavy, there are more pragmatic issues, such as: what, beyond the specific predicate, is this conditional testing for? And/or why here? After this method call, what has been changed? How could this code have produced that result? Often, the answers to these questions is obvious, but it is the cases where it is not that determine readability. Indentation is remarkably effective in helping one read code, perhaps unreasonably raising expectations that other changes to the layout of code will be similarly effective, but I personally have not seen anything else that gets close, and the nature of the problems to be solved makes me doubt that there will be. [1] One could argue that code is not prose, but one goal of higher-level languages is to make it more like prose, and I think my points here are relevant regardless of whether one thinks this is the case.

chii 6y ago
It is sometime confusing that people call readability as textual readability - i.e., a visual and positional property of the code. What I would consider readability is probably closer to what you might call 'ease of understandability'. For example, how much of the code do i have to keep in my head, in order to make sense of what is on the screen. How much conceptual understanding of the underlying algorithm must I understand before the code can make sense? Is there any special language quirk or knowledge needed to understand the line of code (for example, this is where operator precedence rules often exhibit problems). I don't care that lines are indented "wrong", or that they use ternary expressions, etc, unless this makes material difference to cause understanding to be more difficult.

chii 6y ago

It is sometime confusing that people call readability as textual readability - i.e., a visual and positional property of the code. What I would consider readability is probably closer to what you might call 'ease of understandability'. For example, how much of the code do i have to keep in my head, in order to make sense of what is on the screen. How much conceptual understanding of the underlying algorithm must I understand before the code can make sense? Is there any special language quirk or knowledge needed to understand the line of code (for example, this is where operator precedence rules often exhibit problems). I don't care that lines are indented "wrong", or that they use ternary expressions, etc, unless this makes material difference to cause understanding to be more difficult.