Hacker News Reader

In my professional experience most code never gets read by anyone other than the original author and when it is read it's often reluctantly. If you have any links to studies which show that code is read more often than it is written, I'd be interested to read them.

View on HN

I, just, can't believe you could think that. Have you never debugged code you didn't write? There are six billion people in the planet and you think it's more likely that a given piece of professional code will only ever be read by one person? A person leaves the company and you just delete everything they wrote so nobody can read it?

I'm guessing this means you don't have any studies to back your claim. Neither do I, but in my experience most code is left to run when someone leaves the company. If issues come up, someone is assigned to support the code and nine times out of ten (okay, maybe eight) the person on support decides to rewrite the code. FWIW, the six billion people stat hardly seems relevant, right?

So you have a study? Because I’ve seen way more people who think readability in code is paramount, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen the take that it’s usually never read again.

There are 8 billion people in the world FYI.

“There are 8 billion people in the world. You’re telling me no one wants to read my poetry???”

Reply on news.ycombinator.com