February 2008
Intermediate to advanced
448 pages
9h 46m
English
Historically, code has been more fun to write than to read. Writing code feels creative, progressive, and allows the author to express ideas and explore them. Reading code is tedious, sometimes confusing, and can sap one’s confidence when puzzling out the intent of a piece of code.
Developers have often said that languages like C and APL are write-only languages, a sobriquet that is fairly applied to any code that is cheaper to rewrite than to figure out, when it comes time to make a change. But to say that something is cheaper to rewrite than to fix is to say that it is unmaintainable, and maintainability is one of the goals I am espousing in this book.
What would it take to write maintainable ...