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The Trouble With ‘Readability’
- gruseom 13y agoI like how this article moves the discussion on what "readability" means (or ought to mean) in code. Its point is that what matters is the intelligibility of programs, not individual lines or names. Most "readability" discussions reduce to the same handful of beans: whitespace, comments, and descriptive names. As if readable systems can be built out of those alone! They can't. And so on larger scales, complexity is left to grow like weeds. This is a variant of the bikeshed problem. It's hard to talk about whole-program design, but easy to argue about indentation or criticize a short name. Worse, some of the techniques that improve readability locally can end up impeding it globally. What we badly need and would be very interesting is a discourse around what makes an entire system easier to 'get'.