On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 3:12 PM, Joachim De Beule <joachim.de.be...@gmail.com > wrote:
> Please define "readable". > > Thanks! > > "Readable" is a measure of how readily apparent the meaning of a program is from looking at it. If you wanted to measure this objectively, one possible way to do this would be to time how long it takes a group of programmers to read and understand a well-crafted program to perform some complex algorithm. Let's assume that the programmers are all competent in the language being measured. There are other things you might also measure: you could quiz them to determine if they really understand it as well as they think they do, you could ask them to modify the code, you could ask them to self-rate their subjective sense of how easy it was to understand the program. Tim Daly has opined several times that it would be nice if researchers would do something like this for literate programming, for example. It would be useful to know for sure whether programs in literate form are more readable than ordinary "self-documenting" code. We tend to think of readability as a fairly subjective thing, and it is subjective to the extent that for most of us, the only measure that matters is how long we personally feel it takes us to understand code written in a given language, and how much effort we have to expend to gain that understanding. But certainly it is a quantifiable concept, and it is theoretically possible to compare languages, code coloring schemes, documentation styles, pop-up support, and all other aspects of code readability in an objective way. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
