alt Hacker NewsThis raises an interesting point. I've speculated that if someone has a hard time expressing themselves to other humans verbally or in writing, they're also going to have a hard time writing human-readable code. The two things are rooted in the same basic abilities. Writing documentation or comments in the code at least gives someone two slim chances at understanding them, instead of just one.
I have the opposite problem. Granted, I'm not a software developer, but only use code as a problem solving tool. But once again, adding comments to my code gives me two slim chances of understanding it later, instead of one.
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> I've speculated that if someone has a hard time expressing themselves to other humans verbally or in writing
I don't think they have actually problems with expressing themselves, code is also just a language with a very formal grammar and if you use that approach to structure your prose, it's also understandable. The struggle is more to mentally encode non-technical domain knowledge, like office politics or emotions.
I think there’s some of that, but it’s also probably a thing where people who make good tutors/mentors tend to write clearer code as well, and the Venn diagram for that is a bit complicated.
Concise code is going to be difficult if you can’t distill a concept. And that’s more than just verbal intelligence. Though I’m not sure how you’d manage it with low verbal intelligence.