gitonthescene

In my experience code reviews are generally cursory and the emphasis on “readability” is more about a culture that seeks to treat programmers as fungible. Also complaints about APL’s lack of readability are never about its lack of structure. So I took “readability” to mean something else as should be clear from my previous comment. Is your complaint about its lack of structure? If so would you mind elaborating?

Serious question: Why is readability so important? For me consistency is far more important than anything as subjective as readability. I’d rather be able to reason about a code in its own logic than feel comfortable browsing code without much consistency. In the end all code needs to be understood for its internal logic and notation is secondary.

Are you counting reading code while you’re developing it? That would sound strange to me. If you’re talking maintenance by someone other than the original developer the pattern I’ve seen is minimal engagement with the code and an almost immediate press to replace it. I’d guess you’re talking about an idealized world.

Hard disagree on code being read more often than it is written. I’ve never seen any study of this and in my experience it is not true. Most code reviews end up being perfunctory. Even calling that “reading” is generous.

Who said code written in this style is lazy?

All good decisions are a product of the particular circumstances in which they arise. This post seemed to be about generalizing that process which I would guess comes out of a supposition of fungiblity.

As much as one can use a given style for a personal project so can one for a professional one so long as it fills the given need. Too often (in my view) fungibility is seen as a preeminent requirement and layers and layers of self justifying processes are built on top of that. I’m only saying that’s a choice and the costs and benefits are not as obvious as most suppose.

Also you can minimize risks with redundancy but most presume those costs to be too high. But again this quickly becomes about politics.

Best guess is that your analysis is missing some detail. People not tools write programs. Also any serious discussion here ends up in politics. If you design your software so that the programmers are fungible then the software suffers regardless of your choices.

Are you saying most employers are smart by default??

I think _all_ programming is about finding an appropriate DSL for the problem at hand. First you need to understand the “language” of the problem then you develop a “lingo”.

I’d bet that a lot of the work done with AI assistants is decidedly _not_ clever.

Losing control of a project is likely more due to the programmers on it than the tools they use. IMHO _anything_ done consistently can be reasoned about and if necessary undone.

The zoo is a collection of web interfaces to a number of array languages written by several people including ATW.

Perhaps a more precise question is whether you can write programs as performant as those written in C or Fortran and the answer is it depends on the program (and more likely the programmer). The languages tend to do memory management for you which means giving up some control. Most use “immutable” data structures which force more contraints.

But for the loss of control you get stuff like fancy SIMD implementation for nothing.

All and all there’s a cost/benefit calculation but that ratio can get quite low.

I know you! We worked together for a MF at GS.