>It was just basically the way you solve some kind of an unknown puzzle—make tables and charts and get a little more information here and make a hypothesis. In general when I’m reading a technical paper, it’s the same challenge. I’m trying to get into the author’s mind, trying to figure out what the concept is. The more you learn to read other people’s stuff, the more able you are to invent your own in the future, it seems to me.
I really enjoyed reading this article, but I would argue with its headline. Based on the author's experience and the example from Donald Knuth, it seems like the best way to read code is to go through it multiple times to the point where you could reimplement it or provide complete documentation for it.
The literary analog for code reading might be a writing a scholarly reader's companion to a book.
You can't write a secondary source for a work of literature by reading it once through like a drugstore thriller or romance. A literary analyst would read the book through completely >3 times and spend hours on certain key passages. They would take extensive notes reconstructing the innerworkings of the characters, the relationships between them, and key themes. Once the work has been comprehensively understood, the scholar can write out in an expository manner what is going on in the piece of literature, the same way that a thoroughly digested piece of software can be rewritten based on the mental model that develops as you read.
Obviously software and novels do not map completely one onto the other. I think the key similarity is that they both can be created with sufficient complexity to require taking multiple passes and following along with the author, building something similar yourself in order to truly understand them.
I really enjoyed reading this article, but I would argue with its headline. Based on the author's experience and the example from Donald Knuth, it seems like the best way to read code is to go through it multiple times to the point where you could reimplement it or provide complete documentation for it.
The literary analog for code reading might be a writing a scholarly reader's companion to a book.
You can't write a secondary source for a work of literature by reading it once through like a drugstore thriller or romance. A literary analyst would read the book through completely >3 times and spend hours on certain key passages. They would take extensive notes reconstructing the innerworkings of the characters, the relationships between them, and key themes. Once the work has been comprehensively understood, the scholar can write out in an expository manner what is going on in the piece of literature, the same way that a thoroughly digested piece of software can be rewritten based on the mental model that develops as you read.
Obviously software and novels do not map completely one onto the other. I think the key similarity is that they both can be created with sufficient complexity to require taking multiple passes and following along with the author, building something similar yourself in order to truly understand them.