[21asdffdsa12]

Im talking about the speed of mental model building, understanding concepts, relations and organizational concepts.

Good codebases sort of read themselves. You can guess where things are, how they are sorted and how they work, by understanding and relying on the authors ideas.

[hnlmorg]

“Good” code makes trade offs. While readability is an important constraint, it’s far from being the only constraint. And there are plenty of occasions where objectively better code is subjectively harder to read because other constraints trump human parserability, such as using CPU-friendly memory layouts, SIMD-instructions in tight mathematical loops, and so on and so forth.

Not to mention that readability is entirely dependent on the readers familiarity with particular coding styles. Eg someone unfamiliar with SQL would find ORMs easier to read, whereas I find SQL easier than ORMs. Same is true for any other paradigm, eg for functional vs imperative.

And this is why I hate when people generalise about human readability being the definition of “good code”. For one thing, there will never be a consensus on what is more readable. And external constraints might require subjectively less readable code.