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Comment by evanpw | Hacker News Reader

> An expert would be able to skim it, recognize the path of reasoning as something he's seen a before, and narrow down on the error quickly.

This is almost exactly equivalent to saying that an expert programmer should be able to determine whether an unfamiliar, complicated code base contains a bug by skimming the source. The hard bugs are going to be subtle.

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Not at all equivalent, because code isn't meant to be human readable, but computer interpretable. Because of these different goals, computer code is actually quite a bit harder to read than a well structured academic paper. I think programmers have a lot to learn about logical structure from writing meant to be read by humans [1].

Note how many people on this thread seem to be understanding and discussion its contents, whereas if I were to post 13 pages of "unfamiliar, complicated code" that claimed to do something, I can't imagine anyone would help me debug it.

1. Knuth expounds on this idea here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming

I agree, but not all bugs are subtle. This seems to be the equivalent to someone having trouble with "hello world" because they forgot to include iostream.

> complicated code base

So then the answer is certainly "yes" with the same level of certainty that algorias is claiming. Large, complicated solutions are inherently likely to have subtle flaws.

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