Excerpt: In the Pragmatic Programmer, Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas tell us: “it’s critical that you write code that is readable and easy to reason about.” This se

Excerpt: In the Pragmatic Programmer, Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas tell us: “it’s critical that you write code that is readable and easy to reason about.” This seems uncontroversial; it is the rare point on which software engineers typically agree. Or do they? In fact, developers disagree about what “readability” means. “Readability” can be given two contrary meanings that we will call imperative readability (or readability-i) and declarative-readability (or readability-d).