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Comment by airfreak | Hacker News Reader

I used a screen reader for a few years due to sight issues, these days I use a screen again with magnification. When you work without a screen you end up having to build up a mental model of the code, which you keep inside your head. When you navigate the code, you are doing it mentally, inside this cathedral you maintain in your mind.

So given that, the main challenge for me was code navigation. I used Visual Studio at the time and it allowed me to jump to method definitions, call references, jump to the start/end of a method etc. So the worst thing was long methods as 1) I had no efficient way of navigating them except to read each line 2) it was hard to keep track of all the things the method did. Breaking up code into smaller pieces with good naming of each method helped speed up my understanding and navigation of the code a lot. It also simplified the mental model in my mind.

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As a person who can visually see, I want to emphasize that these goals: short methods (max 40 LOCs) and speaking names for all code entities are equally important to me. I want to spend as few time as possible reading the code. I want to spend most time on modifying and transforming the code. I do so by building up a mental model which I can change freely before typing the changes down. Sometimes it helps to write down the ideas to see how they "look like", however everything you say applies equally well to me as a non-blind programmer.

Another important trait of easy to read code is the rule of "Big picture" first. I.e. if you have a `main()` method you will find it first in my files, only then followed by sub methods which are called by main(). Same holds for types: first comes the class and then it's followed by any type which might be required for a class attribute. So, when opening a file you immediately get the big picture and depending on the granularity you want to build for your mental model you can continue reading by scrolling down. When the model is good enough, you can skip the rest of the file.

I find this pattern to the contrary of how others design their files. There are people who list all details and sub methods first before telling me only further down the road how these details are put together. This forces me to read a lot of code to build a blown up mental model which might not be necessary for the current task at hand.

I've just written a little parser I OCaml, and the file goes like this:

  Module declarations                         ( 3 lines)
  Parser type declaration                     ( 1 line )
  Implementation details you don't care about (47 lines)
  Actual grammar                              (20 lines)

In that order. In Haskell, I would probably have put the grammar at the top of the file, so you can get the big picture right away. But the language reads stuff from top to bottom, so I have to put the big picture at the bottom.

An alternative would be separate the details from the grammar, but then I would expose those implementation details in an interface, while in fact the rest of the program is only interested in one function that parses everything.

Or, you could write from bottom to top. It's OCaml, so you know the big picture cannot be at the top. Now a case could be made for a language that reads toplevel statements from bottom to top…

To be fair, C is kind of like that, too. You could move the declarations of static functions to the top, but then you'd still have declarations that prevent you from getting to the real meat.

That and poor/nonexistent syntax for macros are about my only 2 serious gripes I have with OCaml. The third was missing multithreading, but IIIC this seems to kinda be workable now with lwt IIUC?

In my career I have found programmers generally fall into two camps:

- those that prefer high-level overviews first, then drill down to learn details later

- those that want to thoroughly understand each smaller building block first before dealing with bigger picture concerns

For example, I jump right into projects and skim the docs and start hacking stuff together without learning the nuts and bolts, whereas my cofounder likes to read the theory behind the library, then read the source code before even starting to write a single line that uses the library. Both approaches are valid, I've just found most people tend to strongly prefer one approach or the other, and it's helpful to identify what a person's preferred approach is when working with them.

> When you work without a screen you end up having to build up a mental model of the code, which you keep inside your head. When you navigate the code, you are doing it mentally, inside this cathedral you maintain in your mind.

Interesting! I am not visually impaired (not beyond what can be fixed with reading glasses), but I have always worked like that with code.

To get some perspective on the difficulty of building this model, imagine you can see fine, but your screen can only display one word (token) at a time. You can navigate with arrow keys and a list of keyboard short-cuts.

This restriction applies to whether you are coding, browsing the web (on Stack Overflow), reading XML (shudder).

So the importance of a mental model is critical, because without maintaining context of where you are, you can get lost and spend too much time rediscovering your surroundings. The better your model the faster you can navigate and the less effort required in general.

I think you have nailed the reason why I work like that: I learned to program in the days of line editors. So it was quite like what you said, only not with a word at the time but a line at the time which is way too little context so you need something to offset that.

This might be a stupid question, but is there a kind of "modern" line editor, maybe with jump-to functionality, that would only show me one line of code at a time?

I wonder if programming like that would force an improvement in my code: kind of like programming through a keyhole, rather than the information overload of 20 documents open simultaneously.

Maybe an Emacs mode with Intellisense, that only showed a line at a time, with syntax highlighting?

Never used it standalone but I'd think that is what "ed" is?

Well, you could always set your window to be only one line high, that would have much the same effect.

Thank you for posting, it's interesting.

I wish a good blind programmer would write a book. I really think there are great gains to be made in programming, when we find ways to optimize the way we build and maintain our mental models of an application. I suspect blind programmers have some good insights to share.

IMO this is good engineering practice in general. It’s also super helpful for sighted programmers.

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