Tag: readability

Defining readable code

Code readability is something that I often bring up during code reviews, but I often have trouble explaining why I find a piece of code to be easy or difficult to read.

When you ask programmers how to make code easier to read, many of them will mention things like coding standards, descriptive naming, and decomposition. These things actually aid in making code easier to comprehend rather than easier to read. For me, readability is at a lower level, somewhere between legibility and comprehension.

At the lowest level is legibility. This is how easily individual characters can be distinguished from each other, and can usually be boiled down to the choice of font, as well as the foreground & background colours.