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> You're conflating comprehensibility with readability - they're not the same. There's a reason why people get tested for "reading comprehension" and not just "
by hbrn 4y ago
> You're conflating comprehensibility with readability - they're not the same. There's a reason why people get tested for "reading comprehension" and not just "reading".
"Reading comprehension" is not the same as "reading" only for natural languages, because we can "read" words by transforming them into sounds.
In the context of programming, reading and comprehending are synonyms. Nobody cares if you can "vocalize" the code without comprehending it.
- klibertp 4y agoMaybe nobody cares, but visually identifying a token and comprehending its meaning are still distinct steps. What I'm trying to say is that visual identification - the thing that syntax is responsible for - is the easy part, and the latter is so much harder that the former almost doesn't count. It's not that I think syntax doesn't matter at all. It does, in some context it matters a lot - just not because of readability. And most definitely not because it looks pretty or ugly.