Yeah I think he's really off-base there, and the rest of the paragraph is wrong too: "The idea that you'd settle down in a deep leather chair with your smoking

Yeah I think he's really off-base there, and the rest of the paragraph is wrong too: "The idea that you'd settle down in a deep leather chair with your smoking jacket and a snifter of brandy for a fine evening of reading through someone else's code is absurd." Absurd? It's basically what I did recently with ClojureScript One, replacing brandy with beer and deep leather chair with kitchen table and chair. I found it very enjoyable and enlightening. And I'm not trying to brag, I really don't think this is a mark of anything special. IIRC publishing and highlighting code that was interesting to read was one of the goals that Peter Seibel wanted to tackle with Code Quarterly (which didn't pan out, but still, he didn't think it was an absurd suggestion). I also seem to recall reading code being something a lot of the people interviewed in Coders At Work described as being valuable. And one of the stock questions Seibel asked everyone in that book was if they had tried literate programming ("a la Knuth"), which is really just a way to make large pieces of code easier to be read by someone else. All's to say, absurd it clearly is not.