How to read code

Everyone knows how to read a book. Beginning at the first page, you read each word in order1, stopping periodically to think, until you arrive at the last word on the last page. That’s how you read a newspaper article, or a poem, or an email. Why would reading code be any different? Why code is different English text is designed to be read in order. In fact, there are almost no constraints on the order of a text aside from how you want the reader to consume it. In writing this post, I could put the ideas I want to convey in any order I like. Code, on the other hand, is designed to be run by a computer. The order is thus primarily determined by non-human factors. I cannot simply move2 a line of code to the beginning of a file or function because I think it provides a better introduction to the program for human readers. The other big difference is that English text is always read as a final product, while code is usually read as a diff. We software engineers spend most of our time…