Blog - Code Reading becoming more valuable¶
Australian model L McPherson was famously quoted as saying I never read books. I didn't write..
I suspect a lot of people prefer reading code they wrote themselves. Like laughing at your own jokes, Code produced by your brain even if you've forgotten it follows the patterns of your thinking and is less ethic to rock
I also suspect many people would prefer to rewrite code from scratch rather than make substantial modifications to someone else's code.
We like writing code. We would rather be the pen than the paper. The nose than the handkerchief.
I suspect many programmers throughout their career Right for more many lines of code than they read. (If you exclude code, they wrote from the total amount that they read)
I bought a book called code reading many years ago. I have found uses for it, but reading it was not one of them ironically. Perhaps it would be value in a companion volume called code reading reading
People can read on average about 150 words per minute. I'm not sure how this translates to lines of code but given the comparative lack of practice and possibly lack of thoughts into how to improve their Covid reading I think that there would be large improvements that could be made in code reading ability by many programmers
The need for and value in code reading skills is about to go through the roof with the advent of a programmers that generate code at 5×5 times faster then we can read it
The risk that projects will bloat with buggy or even malicious code being added to projects by developers who check the test pass but don't read and understand the code this presents massive security and reliability risks
So in the advent of us all having a fire hose spewing code we all need to become engineering overseas development leads etc