by hackrmn | 2025-08-31 12:24:32+00:00
In my experience, writing readable code and writing code that behaves correctly (fulfills the contract/requirements without hiding potential faults) is often mutually exclusive -- most people end up doing one or the other. This is related to the never-ending functional programming vs. "traditional programming" (a target in motion, largely OOP or in the very least "whatever is taught at the graduate schools"), since the former, in contrast to the article which pretty much _assumes_ the latter, doesn't even facilitate "variables", literally or in informal sense (things you can "assign to", whether changing or not).

Anyway, I happen to belong in the latter category according to most -- the longer I have been doing this, the more I lean into the purely functional style, almost mathematical vigor, because I have learned how much (or rather little) margin there is to introduce subtle errors once you have actual _variables_ that may change freely, which start to encourage you to do other things which in the end contribute to lack of correctness, readable or not.

Now, you may blame people like me, and I cannot blame you for not having the cognitive load capacity to understand some of the code I write "succinctly", but my point is that for all the merit of the article (yes, I agree code is read much more often than it is written, lending value to the "readability" argument), it doesn't acknowledge the fact readability and correctness are _in practice_ often mutually exclusive. Like, in the field. Because I wager that the tendency is to approach a more mathematical expression style as one becomes better at designing software, with adversarial conditions manifesting in terms of bugs hiding in mutability of state and large, if "simple", bodies of functions, classes (which have methods you cannot guarantee to not mutate the object's state).

We need to find means to write code that is readable but without compromising other factors like mutability which _too_ has been shown to compromise correctness. What good is readable software that never manages to escape the vortex of issues, driving the perpetually busy industry "fixing bugs".

At my place of work, I obviously see both kinds of the "mutually exclusive", and I can tell you without due pride and yet with good confidence, people who write readable code -- consisting of aliasing otherwise complex expression with eloquently named variables (or sometimes even "constants", bless their heart), and designing clumsy class hierarchies -- spend a lot of subsequent effort never being able to be "done" with the code, and I don't mean just because requirements keep changing, no -- they sit and essentially "fixup commit" to the code they write, in perpetuity, seemingly. And we have select few who'd write a code-base with as few variables as possible, with a lot of pure function -- what I referred to as "mathematical programming" in a way -- and I never hear from them much offering "PRs" to fix their earlier mishaps. The message that sends me is pretty clear.

So yeah, by all means, let's find ways to write code our fellow man can understand, but the article glosses over a factor that is at least as important -- all the mutability and care for "cognitive load" capacity (which _may be_ lower for current generation of software engineers vs earlier ones) may be keeping us in the rotating vortex of bugs we so "proudly" crouch over as we pretend we are "busy". I, for one, prefer to write code that works right from get-go, and not have to come back to said code unless the requirements which made me write it the way I did, change. On a very rare occasion, admittedly, I have to sacrifice readability for correctness, not because it's inherently one or the other, but because I too haven't yet found the perfect means to always have both, and yet correctness is on the absolute top of my list, and I advocate that it should be on top of your as well, dare I to say so. But that is me -- perhaps I set the bar too high?