Understand That Typing Isn’t the Bottleneck in Programming
We programmers don’t write code. Sure, we do that, too, but coding is not where we spend most of our time. Instead, our most common task is to make improvements in existing code, and the majority of that time is spent trying to understand the current solution. Consequently, our primary work as programmers isn’t to write code but to understand what’s already there.
The code we need to decipher may have been written by our teammates, a long-gone contractor, or—often—our younger and less-informed selves. Once we know what to change, the modification may be trivial. But the road to that enlightenment can be painful.
This is particularly important during software maintenance. In Facts and ...
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