Is Code For Computers or for People? [closed]

Answer 1

I would recommend taking a look at Clean Code by Robert Martin. It's a great guide on how to make your code more readable and, well, clean.

Answer 2

Don't use hungarian notation in a typesafe language.

Answer 3

“Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.” -- Martin Fowler, "Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code"

But since you've already reached that conclusion on your own, suffice to say that this is a huge topic. It's not something you'll be able to get a single answer on. Making your code maintainable is not limited to coding style, but also involves your overall design as well as your construction process. Here's some tags on this site where pretty much all the questions and answers will impinge on this topic:

• coding-style
• best-practices
• refactoring

Answer 4

Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

-- from "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" by Abelson and Sussman

Answer 5

<sarcasm> Code only has to be read by a machine. So long as the end result fulfulls the user's need, it doesn't matter what the code looks like.</sarcasm>

Now maintainable code or code that can change, that's a completely different story.

Would you build a house with a plan scribbled on the back of a napkin, or throw away the blueprints after you're done building a house you might want to add a room onto one day?