On Sun, Jul 13, 2014 at 6:41 AM, Erling Hellenäs <[email protected]> wrote: > Of what use is a notation that is unreadable? /Erling
How much code to you read in other languages? What do you do with it after you read it? I've been coding for decades, and I've noticed that "readability" and "code reuse" gets a lot of lip service, but when I go in and actually look at how things work, there's not actually all that much "reading" and most of the re-use happens without much thought. Take a look at the LibreSSL project for an example of the significance of this issue. Anyways, as a result, most code is junk. There's tons of dead code in production systems which never gets executed or fails to do what it was originally designed to do. And people are too scared of breaking things to do much about it. Meanwhile, there's other people whose job it is to break stuff (but only in a limited sense - based on sales of their services or the hierarchical equivalent) and pretty much anything can be broken. You want to see an example of this? Find a good sized free software project and build it from source. Chrome is a good example - chromium is free software, and is built nightly. So try and build it yourself. (This is also a worthwhile exercise to undertake as an antidote to any "quip related" design insight - static vs. dynamic typing, "DRY", etc. etc...) Doing anything useful is humbling, and people get impatient. But nothing is readable. Most english works don't get read by almost everyone. We spend trillions of dollars educating people which mostly seems to get ignored by most advertising, most media, most efforts, most management, etc. The exceptions are what keeps things working. That, and people dedicated to distributing food, water, and building somewhat comfortable places to live and work. "If it's not broke, don't fix it." Does that answer your question? Thanks, -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
