Critical Program Reading (1975) – 16mm Film

Nearly fifty years old, and a lot of the code written today still has issues with readability.

Code reviews and coding conventions can help with this. It’s not always enough, though, to make readable, understandable code. It’s also very easy for one group of people to agree to a convention that another group might find objectionable.

We don’t tend to teach about these topics in school, either, so many people come out of school with what they saw in books as the basis for how code should be written.

It’s pretty amazing that all these years later we still struggle with these issues, which makes me wonder if it’s just inherent, or if we just don’t emphasize readability enough across the industry. I know some companies do, but it hardly seems universal.