> By analogy, plenty of people find reading Homer, Shakespeare, or Nabokov difficult and challenging, but we don’t say “Macbeth is unreadable.”
What of Joyce's Ulysses?
The thing is, most authors do put considerable effort into readability, because it helps you get read, published and paid. There's an interesting parallel with this article - writer:programmer :: critique group:code review.
> Programmers, prone to investing their ego in their code, worry about criticism from a lot of people they don’t know. Slurs about competency abound in programmer forums. Code samples out of context get critiqued and subjected to stylistic nit-picking. That process can prove helpful for programmers with thick skins who can interpret criticism as either useful mentoring or useless insults. Less experienced programmers can get misled and brow-beaten. Public code reviews create a kind of programmer performance art, when programmers write code to impress other programmers, or to avoid withering criticism from self-appointed experts
s/programmer/author and it still holds. As does much of the rest of the article.
I would say that programmer education really does underplay reading code. Students are taught to write small pieces and may never be shown a large novel-sized lump of code unless they go looking for it.
Ulysses is not unreadable, it just takes a lot of effort. For programming, the criteria is not if it is hard to read, but whether the same thing could be expressed in way that would be simpler and easier to read. But I not sure to what extent this could be applied to poetry, since the expression in language is in itself "the thing".
"Unreadable" in this whole discussion should be taken as meaning "requires effort that the reader is not willing to expend", not an absolute. There are very few things that are impossible to read at all, even the notoriously and deliberately unintelligible stunt languages like INTERCAL and brainfk.
I'd even go so far to say that the only way something can be literally unreadable is if it is physically impossible to do so (e.g. unrecoverable data) or there is not yet any known way of determining the meaning of a given text (e.g. the Voynich manuscript).
But of course that isn't what is meant when we say something is unreadable because humans don't deal in absolutes (though programmers sometimes do, which is why programmers are so fond of using overly noncommital language like "should" and "most likely").
Yeah. If you wrote a comment in the style of Ulysses (at least, in one of several of the styles used there), I'm not going to bother trying to read it. It may be something profound said very well, but I still am going to err on the side of assuming that it's a waste of my time.
And if you write your code in the equivalent of the style of Ulysses, well, let's just say that having PhD dissertations several decades from now that try to explain exactly what your code means is not the same as code readability.
What of Joyce's Ulysses?
The thing is, most authors do put considerable effort into readability, because it helps you get read, published and paid. There's an interesting parallel with this article - writer:programmer :: critique group:code review.
> Programmers, prone to investing their ego in their code, worry about criticism from a lot of people they don’t know. Slurs about competency abound in programmer forums. Code samples out of context get critiqued and subjected to stylistic nit-picking. That process can prove helpful for programmers with thick skins who can interpret criticism as either useful mentoring or useless insults. Less experienced programmers can get misled and brow-beaten. Public code reviews create a kind of programmer performance art, when programmers write code to impress other programmers, or to avoid withering criticism from self-appointed experts
s/programmer/author and it still holds. As does much of the rest of the article.
I would say that programmer education really does underplay reading code. Students are taught to write small pieces and may never be shown a large novel-sized lump of code unless they go looking for it.