I disagree. You can call it reading, or call it decoding, or call it reading carefully, or ... . To me, it's still reading.
So how often do I read programs? Every day. Most hours of every hour that I spent programming. Most often, it is a program I have written myself. When I write a program I try to write the best that I know how, because if I don't, I know that I will have trouble reading it later. My primary means of debugging is reading. My primary tool for optimization is reading. (Well, perhaps not, but reading would rank just behind thinking.) An example of code reading, or at least presenting the result of such reading, happened in the J Forum last month: http://www.jsoftware.com/pipermail/source/2013-December/000525.html . I probably have not looked at the code for years before looking at it again (reading it) last December in response to Raul Miller's request. On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 1:05 PM, Devon McCormick <[email protected]> wrote: > I've already weighed in with a (largely ignored) minority opinion on this > discussion on Slashdot - > > http://developers.slashdot.org/story/14/01/21/1847217/code-is-not-literature- > that's based on this essay: > http://www.gigamonkeys.com/code-reading/ . > > Personally, I've always viewed Knuth's push for "code as literature" with > considerable skepticism and this essay by Peter Siebel re-enforces my > skepticism. > > On a related note, check out the contribution from Dan Bron I plan to > include in tonight's talk: > http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/DevonMcCormick/StatisticalCorrelationInWords > . > > -- > Devon McCormick, CFA > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
