It's Harder to Read Code Than Write It

https://matt-rickard.com/its-hard-to-read-code-than-write-it

by tapanjk • 4 years ago

14 14 4 years ago

uberman3• 4 years ago

My experience says the opposite is true.

djmips3• 4 years ago

You must live in an utopia and/or are very good at reading code. My experience sees a lot of code around me get re-written because of poor comprehension skills.

uberman3• 4 years ago

I'm not sure it is fair to say that because we disagree I must live in a fantasy land.

I can read almost any block of code from almost any language and I bet almost everyone can as well.

You typically dont need to be able to even write code in a given language to understand it.

leed25d• 4 years ago

I am reminded here of Harold Ableson's dictum that programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

suprjami• 4 years ago

As someone whose job is mostly to read and debug others' code, thanks.

rowanG077• 4 years ago

Maybe if you are starting out. But over the years I have found reading code to actually be easier. You don't need to solve any problem. You just read the (sometimes obfuscated, and incorrect) solution.

Writing code only appears easier. But once you factor in the cost of it becoming correct over time it's much harder.

karmakaze• 4 years ago

If you know an algorithm and writing out the code for it, that can be straightforward. Also if you're reading code for an algorithm that you already know that can also be straightforward.

What's difficult is if you don't already know the algorithm. Still writing code that does what you want can be done incrementally without fully knowing an algorithm and building it up from parts and edge-cases. This can lead to code with accidental complexity. Reading this kind of code is indeed difficult.

Code that's well written with any advanced or situation-specific algorithm can also be hard to read. Rewriting it won't help. It may not have been hard to write for the author who did know the algorithm. The best thing to do is document the approach, either in a PR description that can be found on GitHub from a git blame commit hash. Alternatively some choice comments can make it much easier to understand, e.g. before/after or loop invariants.

The problem isn't 'reading code' or 'writing code' as each statement is easy enough to parse, but understanding the whole may not naturally follow from understanding the statements.

So really 'writing code' is often spelling out what you already know, which is easy. Reading code to gain an understanding of an approach you don't already know is a different skill than writing, so will be more difficult without practice. More often than not however is that there is excess cognitive load from poor naming of methods, variables, classes, or subdivision of the problem.

xyzzy4747• 4 years ago

Reading code isn’t that bad but refactoring is without some good integration tests.

tapanjk• 4 years ago

This has implications on how we use large language models like GitHub Copilot to autogenerate code. Our ability to write code will even further exceed our ability to read it.

In other words, our ability to modify existing code will degrade.

floppiplopp• 4 years ago

I always tell my trainees that they write code not for themselves, but for a murderous psychopath how knows where they live.

krueger71• 4 years ago

Often mentioned and relevant to the subject:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

It's Harder to Read Code Than Write It

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