I value being able to grasp what the code does at a glance while scrolling through. Your first snippet is entering my brain like as if without even reading at all, all at once and instantly.
Your second example absolutely does not and I'm sure you know why.
Its not about understanding a line of code - anybody can do that. Its about absorbing kilo-lines of code and gaining an understanding of the whole thing. Without having to draw attention to every line.
I can read code by the page, hitting next page at about a 1Hz rate. If the code is not overheated. That means, avoid lots of syntactic bloat, keep it concise, keep it modular, with low branching. Just about what the OP says.
As a total monoglot who regrets not learning languages properly when he was a kid, this still seems pretty obvious to me that at least I don't read code in the way I read natural language, or maths.
However it's always good to have intuitions like this confirmed or refuted by actual investigation, and putting them on a more solid footing within the broader context.
My personal experience of reading code has always felt more like looking at a mechanical mechanism, or perhaps solving a paper maze where you see the whole thing at once but can focus on parts as well. It isn't something I look at one line at a time, I read it in structural blocks, almost a breadth-first reading. I see the if/else statement and structure before I see any of the details of each branch. It's a deeply non-linear process of going up and down levels of abstraction where necessary, and ignoring details at lower levels that are irrelevant to the task at hand.
This is a really good question and one that I'm having trouble answering. I find that I don't read through code in a definable way, it's more organic. I think it really comes down to (as previously mentioned by someone) why I'm reading through it.
Example, at work sometimes I need to read through other peoples code for reviews / bug fixes / enhancements. In that case I'll read the bits that matter or that I'm not sure what they're doing. Other times I might read, for example, the source to jQuery or a site or something to find out how something being done. In that case I'll try and follow where it does things by jumping between function as the compiler / interpreter would.
Where I read code is, again, something that isn't hard and fast. I'll more often than not just open it in a text editor (notepad as I'm a Windows man) but sometimes I'll load it into an IDE if it's particularly long or I'm having trouble following it in notepad.
Hmmm, I'm alway really surprised when people comment on threads like this.
How much time did you take to do this, I can read code, but I simply can't casually take a look at code like this and say, hey that's cool, hey that's interesting, I have to concentrate and go line by line, a more debugging state of mind.
There are programmers that can sort of skim read code which just amazes me.
To me, reading new code is like separating a bunch of string that's been tangled together. What thread goes where, what's it's purpose, how is it connected to the other threads? It's a very active process.
Reading language is different, I move my eyes left to right, top to bottom, to consume someone else's ideas. It's a much more passive process than reading code.
Then maybe you are not meant for this? Yes, I do find it really hard to read code I have no interest in, but it was proven that if I understand the underlying idea, I can both read and find issues with the code I'm reading.
The first rule is to care and understand what the code is trying to do.
When you do that, reading your code is like reading Dune for the first time. I have to keep jumping back and forth to the reference to figure out what's going on.
Completely agree to this! One very rarely comes across a completely self contained piece of code such as sorting or searching. The code you are reading or exploring is usually a piece of a larger scheme of things; held together by scaffolding so to say. And unless one actually runs the system (not just that specific code) end to end it's really difficult to understand.
I've also found it very useful to slightly modify the code and compare my expectation with the actual result of a test run.
Often, yes. Reading code very rarely induces me to understand what I'm reading (and I'm pretty undisciplined, so rather than being able to force myself to think deeply about it, I often just reread until I "get" it). However, figuring out how to build something like it myself promotes understanding much faster, in my experience.
This was exactly my experience when I was working in Go. Each line was easy to understand, but reading actual code was painful because I needed to read so much to figure out what was actually being done. I was basically spending 90% of the time mentally simplifying the code into abstractions so that I could understand the business logic. Then once I understood the business logic I had to zoom back in to check that their inlined reimplementation of various basic data manipulation routines were correct.
'Unlike novels or newspaper articles, where you can skim through a paragraph and learn the gist of it, software is inevitably full of complexities and important details that you just have to take the time to understand.'
It's definitely possibly to skim-read code in the same way you would a newspaper article.
The article is interesting but I'm not convinced by the argument, although I might try switching off syntax highlighting for a while.
This! When reading/skimming through source code I find the structure very important to understand that a decision is being made and not just a simple variable assignment.
Sometimes more code is easier to read than shorter code. Even
In my almost 30 years in the industry I've run into plenty of people who claimed they knew what code did by reading it, but in practice every single one of them turned out to be only another human flummoxed by unexpected runtime behavior.
The small increase in cognitive load when writing the code pays off when reading it. My editor can tell me where a function is used. It can't tell me what a function does.
I value being able to grasp what the code does at a glance while scrolling through. Your first snippet is entering my brain like as if without even reading at all, all at once and instantly.
Your second example absolutely does not and I'm sure you know why.
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