The Wrong Kind of Readability
In the Pragmatic Programmer, Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas tell us: “it’s critical that you write code that is readable and easy to reason about.” This seems uncontroversial; it is the rare point on which software engineers typically agree. Or do they? In fact, developers disagree about what “readability” means. “Readability” can be given two contrary meanings that we will call imperative readability (or readability-i) and declarative-readability (or readability-d). Imperative Readability This form of readability focuses on how the code operates. It emphasizes a clear presentation of the implementation details, such as which libraries are used, how data sources are accessed, and how functions perform their tasks. ...