Reading code and writing code

Pascal Costanza costanza at web.de
Mon Nov 11 05:41:12 EST 2002


Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters wrote:
> Erik Max Francis <max at alcyone.com> wrote previously:
> |The same goes for Lisp (and all its variants, like Scheme).  You might
> |have to count parentheses if you had to physically write it down with
> |pencil and paper, but in the real world you'll be using an editor, and
> |the editor will help you match parentheses and do the gruntwork for you.
> 
> This is not the same real world I live in!
> 
> In my real world, I probably spend at least 10x as much time READING
> code as I do WRITING it.  I certainly read more of my own code than of
> anyone elses, but I still have to *read* it when I come back to it after
> more than a few minutes... especially when it is a few months or years.

It's actually quite simple to read Lisp source code _once you have 
gotten used to it_. Lispers aren't a bunch of masochists who like to 
torture themselves. If Lisp code were so hard to read it wouldn't have 
survived over 40 years.

You wouldn't reject learning, say, Japanese or Chinese _just_ because of 
their seemingly funny alphabet, would you? ;) It's essentially the same 
with Lisp: It looks funny and takes one week more to get used to, but 
then you've basically mastered it.


Pascal

-- 
Pascal Costanza               University of Bonn
mailto:costanza at web.de        Institute of Computer Science III
http://www.pascalcostanza.de  Römerstr. 164, D-53117 Bonn (Germany)




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