6 ms·
I always thought it was easier to read code than to write it.
by cmollis 3y ago
I always thought it was easier to read code than to write it.
- burnished 3y agoOther way around in my estimation.
- iopq 3y agoI've read every line of a 300,000 line web application in less than a year working at a company. I doubt I could write that many lines of code in that amount of time.
- mewpmewp2 3y agoWhat language do you use? In UI you can reach that 300k loc quite quickly.
- iopq 3y agoPHP, so some of it was JS and some HTML
- kelnos 3y ago300,000 lines of code doesn't seem unattainable for a single developer in a year. If I'm in the zone, I can easily bang out 5-10k lines of code over a weekend if I know what I want to write. But that's the thing: a lot of development involves not writing any code, as you re-think your abstractions, plan the architecture of the next bits you'll write, debug what you've written, etc. So I don't think we're necessarily talking about speed when we say that it's harder to read code than to write it. I think reading -- and truly understanding -- code (especially when it's someone else's, or even yours, that you haven't seen in a long time) can require quite a bit more mental effort than writing code.
- iopq 3y agoSurely you jest, nobody writes a full shopping platform by themselves in a year, yet I read it and deleted all the old code that we didn't need.
- burnished 3y agoInteresting. I usually think about it at a different scale; its much easier to write something small and clever than it is to read and understand it later.