Understanding readability
The readability of a software system is closely tied to its modifiability. Well-written, well-documented code, keeping up with standard or adopted practices for the programming language, tends to produce simple, concise code that is easy to read and modify.
Readability is not only related to the aspect of following good coding guidelines, but it also ties up to how clear the logic is, how much the code uses standard features of the language, how modular the functions are, and so on.
In fact, we can summarize the different aspects of readability as follows:
- Well-written: A piece of code is well-written if it uses simple syntax and well-known features and idioms of the language, if the logic is clear and concise, and if it uses variables, functions, and class/module names meaningfully, that is, they express what they do.
- Well-documented: Documentation usually refers to the inline comments in the code. A well-documented piece of code tells what it does, what its input...
