←back to thread

284 points borski | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.38s | source
1. proverbialbunny ◴[] No.44692282[source]
>In 1980, good programmers spent a lot of time thinking, and then produced spare code that they thought should work. ... But programming now isn’t so much like that, said Sussman. Nowadays you muck around with incomprehensible or nonexistent man pages for software you don’t know who wrote. You have to do basic science on your libraries to see how they work, trying out different inputs and seeing how the code reacts.

Is that how people read code these days? I've always been weaker at reading code, but great at writing it. Iama Data Scientist, which explains why; I haven't had to read tons of code throughout my career. The topic kind of scares me. His description scares me even more.