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Merge pull request #22 from mdeff/patch-1
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typo
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Semigradsky authored Jul 15, 2020
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An infeasible number of years ago I worked on a Cobol system where staff weren't allowed to change the indentation unless they already had a reason to change the code, because someone once broke something by letting a line slip into one of the special columns at the beginning of a line. This applied even if the layout was misleading, which it sometimes was, so we had to read the code very carefully because we couldn't trust it. The policy must have cost a fortune in programmer drag.

There's research to show the we all spend much more of our programming time navigating and reading code — finding *where* to make the change — than actually typing, so that's what we want to optimize for.
There's research to show that we all spend much more of our programming time navigating and reading code — finding *where* to make the change — than actually typing, so that's what we want to optimize for.

- *Easy to scan.* People are really good at visual pattern matching (a leftover from the time when we had to spot lions on the savannah), so I can help myself by making everything that isn't directly relevant to the domain, all the "accidental complexity" that comes with most commercial languages, fade into the background by standardizing it. If code that behaves the same looks the same, then my perceptual system will help me pick out the differences. That's why I also observe conventions about how to lay out the parts of a class within a compilation unit: constants, fields, public methods, private methods.

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A non-programmer friend once remarked that code looks like poetry. I get that feeling from really good code, that everything in the text has a purpose and that it's there to help me understand the idea. Unfortunately, writing code doesn't have the same romantic image as writing poetry.

By [Steve Freeman](http://programmer.97things.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/Steve_Freeman)
By [Steve Freeman](http://programmer.97things.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/Steve_Freeman)

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