I guess we can put things this way: the closer the codebase is to a collection of uncorrelated chunks, the more one can read it "systematically". OTOH, the more

I guess we can put things this way: the closer the codebase is to a collection of uncorrelated chunks, the more one can read it "systematically". OTOH, the more the dependencies between the various chunks, the more useful/efficient a "reverse-engineering reading" becomes. "Bad" naming, operator overloading, both add such dependencies. As a side note regarding operator (well, symbol) overloading: it's just plain awful in mathematics: e.g. a "+" signs can refer to an actual operator between scalar, between vectors, between functions, between spaces, an essentially syntactical element (portion of a name), etc. It makes simple things so hard to understand for novices.