{"id":275,"date":"2015-06-18T08:40:35","date_gmt":"2015-06-18T08:40:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8000\/?p=275"},"modified":"2015-06-18T08:40:35","modified_gmt":"2015-06-18T08:40:35","slug":"the-myth-of-code-anyone-can-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/2015\/06\/the-myth-of-code-anyone-can-read\/","title":{"rendered":"The Myth of Code Anyone Can Read"},"content":{"rendered":"

I got into a conversation recently coming out of the Houston.pm user group meeting. As usual, we wandered over numerous technical topics, but one stuck out in my mind: whether or not to use more advanced or more complicated language idioms.<\/p>\n

I’ve written about programming idioms and advanced code many times in the past (see below<\/a>). Part of the reason for revisiting this topic repeatedly is a mindset that I have seen throughout my career. The idea is to write the code so that anyone can read it<\/em>. Although this sounds reasonable at first, lowest common denominator code (LCDC<\/abbr>) almost always results in a hard-to-maintain code base.<\/p>\n

The Failure of LCDC<\/abbr><\/h2>\n

There are a number of reasons for this simple idea to fall apart. The most obvious comes from your experience of reading text in a human language. If we wanted to keep the text at a level that anyone<\/em> could read, everything would need to be written at a first grade level. That’s really the lowest level that you can claim that someone can read.<\/p>\n

In human languages, text is written at different levels depending on the context and expected audience. Why would you expect programming to be different? Over the next few posts<\/a>, I plan to cover some of the context that would change the way code should be written.<\/p>\n

Over the course of the next few entries, I plan to show different places where writing lowest common denominator code (LCDC<\/abbr>) would harm the project and, possibly, your business.<\/p>\n

<\/a>References<\/h2>\n