Literature: The trouble with 'readability' - akkartik.name

http://akkartik.name/post/readable-bad

I can relate to this quote so very much

But when he gets to ‘how’, here is what we get: good names, comments and consistent indentation. Wait, what?! After all that discussion about how complex programs are, and how hard to understand, do we really expect to make a dent on global complexity with a few blunt, local rules? Does something not seem off?

I think it’s why typical cleanups/modularizations can annoy me, because it doesn’t really attack the problem of global complexity and is a worse is better style of improvement.

Though perhaps time spent thinking about how to solve global complexity in the better is better fashion would have not resulted in anything tangible.

Typically understanding is strengthened in those exercises quite a lot. Is there perhaps a fallacy of focusing on “having something to show for it” to the detriment of the more optimal action that might not feel as meaningful?

Yes, the reason that readability discussions annoy me is because the avoid considering global complexity

Everytime the discussion turns to readability we skip almost unconsciously to style guides and whatnot. Local rules for a fundamentally global problem.

One reason I believe Verbose function and variable names as a default result in more complex code

Ah, he’s talking about the similarity I noticed of people talking about hyper-local complexity and shying away from global complexity being like bikeshedding

Everyone can have an opinion on the color of the shed.

Part of the problem is that talking about local features is easy. It’s easy to teach the difference between a good name and a bad name. Once taught, the reader has the satisfaction of going off to judge names all around him. It’s far harder to show a globally coherent design without losing the reader.

It always comes back to people or human problems ;)

Lots of thought has gone into the small-scale best practices to help maintainers merge changes from others, but there’s been no attempt at learning to communicate large-scale organization to newcomers. Perhaps this is a different skill entirely; if so, it needs a different name than ‘readability’.