At some point in your career, you come to realize that unreadable code is bad code -- and that if you aren't writing readable code, you are a bad coder. Usuall

At some point in your career, you come to realize that unreadable code is bad code -- and that if you aren't writing readable code, you are a bad coder. Usually this realization comes when you are asked to fix something in code so horrible that it causes you to wonder aloud, "What idiot wrote this?" And you look in the repository logs and see that it was you, several months ago. Even if you never intend to maintain code, if you don't want to be that guy whose code everyone hates to work on -- whether out of compassion for your maintainers or out of career self-interest -- you need to know how readable your code is relative to others'. And the only way to know this is to read other people's code.