Comments on: How To Read Code

By: nurnur

nurnur — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 15:01:54 +0000

Grrrreat article!! Thank you. I am implementing your tips right now. The book you recommended is also very good, I keep getting back to it for coding principles.

By: technikhil

technikhil — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 15:16:49 +0000

There is one aspect of code reading that one must consider. In the real world you don’t generally have the luxury of reading self contained code snippets. Sometimes you get a large bunch of inter-connected code or an conditional statement that runs several pages or even a large class hierarchy.
In such cases the more appropriate description of the activity you are doing become “code comprehension” – I write about this in more detail in my post – check it out – http://technikhil.wordpress.com/2010/07/06/how-to-read-code-a-primer/

By: Omer Gertel

Omer Gertel — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 04:51:03 +0000

Actually, modern practice is not to use comments, but make the code self descriptive. This has a few good reasons:
A) In modern languages code is much more readable. Think of python, ruby, Java and C#. Object oriented, high level languages are easier to read.
B) Comments are usually not updated when code changes, which makes them worse than waste. They actually hurt understanding. Comments should really last resort.
Contrary to previous comments, about a function being called only once, it is actually a great way to make the code readable. For example, if you have an if statement – you can create three functions to describe the if statement, and then you don’t need a comment at all:

if (OrangeIsRipe(color, size)) {
MoveToBoxing();
} else {
ThrowAway();
}

By: gary knott

gary knott — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 21:39:55 +0000

Why are we reading code? Isn’t the purpose of comments
to help us avoid reading too much code?

– See http://www.civilized.com/programming.html

By: Pl4n3

Pl4n3 — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 09:56:28 +0000

Great read! Though, splitting functions, not generally makes code readable to me. If new funcs after a split are called only once, i would keep it as code-block in the calling function. Otherwise stuff is too much spread and has misleadings semantics (a function is meant to be generally usable and to be called more than once).

By: Ralph

Ralph — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 14:50:18 +0000

The sad part is the code itself.

Input is not limited to positive numbers – entering a negative number will give meaningless results.
Todo: limit input to positive numbers, use unsigned int variables.

If a rather large max value is use, the resulting sum will overflow – again giving meaningless results.
Todo: limit input to largest number that will sum to maximum int value.

If your loop is iterating through every value, use a for loop. If not, then use a while loop. The while loop here adds extra code that is not clarifying what the code is doing.

Doesn’t matter where your eyes are going if you can’t fix these things!;-)

By: Andrew J. Leer

Andrew J. Leer — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 13:58:51 +0000

I used to go to Vision Therapy (which I later found out the problem had more to do with my TMJ than it did my eyes), and they used a vision tracking system to watch how my eyes moved when I read something. The apparatus looked like a circuit board that fit around my eyes, it wasn’t bulky at all.

I was really surprised when I looked at the results of how my eyes were scanning the page, I don’t think that I was even aware of the course they were taking.

By: Rick

Rick — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 13:24:58 +0000

Thanks for the good post. You have furthered our profession!

By: Omer Gertel

Omer Gertel — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 10:22:30 +0000

@tdwright – Interesting point, but it still means the overall complexity of doing these tests is quite high.
I wonder if a large bunch of test subjects combined with some data-mining algorithms could identify the main patterns. Also, heat maps are simple first-approximation of total focus (some display combining time and heat-map, perhaps?).

By: tdwright

tdwright — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 09:41:43 +0000

As someone who regularly works with eye-tracking technology, I’d have to agree with some of the previous commenters: the technology isn’t that complicated. Most university psychology/neuroscience departments will have a rig.

Moreover, with stimuli this messy, you couldn’t automate the quantification. Instead, you’d have to watch the recordings and categorise different types of saccade. (Preferably, you’d have more than one person do this.) Typically (in academic settings at least), eye-tracking experiments use much simpler stimuli. I suspect this is why they analysed so few people.