alt Hacker News> I explain that, if they don’t write the code, they will not be able to effectively read the code. The ability to read code is certainly going to be valuable, maybe more valuable, in an AI-based coding future.
I'm not certain of this. Thinking back to when I first started in my career after graduation- I remember feeling like my ability to write code had improved greatly during my time in school. Meanwhile, my ability to read code felt like it had barely improved at all. Even now, after over a decade in the industry, while both skills have improved tremendously, I still feel like my ability to read and internalize code is not at the level I would like or assume it to be simply as a result of my experience.
It could very well be that reading and writing are two separate (though related) skills that require intentional practice and honing on their own. I can't speak for everyone, but reading code as a skill, for me, only really began to develop once I had a job where it was expected of me.
Maybe it's possible to learn to read code without learning to write it. It certainly feels like its possible to learn to write it without learning to read it.
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> It certainly feels like its possible to learn to write it without learning to read it.
There's a perhaps subtle difference between possible and viable.
I don’t think so. I strongly believe that writing and reading is pretty much the same, because they are strongly related to thinking. They are even secondary to the latter. I often interacted with juniors and other colleagues and those that do have issue with writing and reading often struggle with formalized thinking.
Taking a problem or a wanted behavior and dissecting it down to logical manipulation is hard for those people. They can go down one or two layers but then they got lost while building the necessary abstraction. You can observe it pretty much in real time as they’re losing track of assumptions for the current context. Thinking that way is a skill and once you can do it, reading and writing code is pretty much effortless.
Both learning to write and learning to read is merely a proxy of learning to think. Doing one while not doing the other is handicapping yourself for no reason.
Would you mind sharing some of the insights you gained on reading code? It could be useful for the more junior of us!
Strong agree. School had me writing stuff myself on the order of a few KLOC at most, and maybe collaborating with a "group" in which at most 2 people actually did anything. What little exposure I got to reading a large codebase I didn't write, was all in personal projects trying to mod open source video games. I'm sure some people had more extensive experiences but that was my bachelor's.
First job had me using a programming language I wasn't super familiar with and trying to add a feature to a codebase 100s of KLOC, all written by other people. Definitely a sink-or-swim moment. My skills of reading and navigating the dreaded Other People's Code were all honed over the next dozen years.
That being said AI is a lot better at reading code than I am, as demonstrated by its ability to find incredibly subtle bugs in huge codebases. So I'm not even sure those code reading skills are all that useful now. When I have to review somebody else's code I get more mileage from pointing an AI at it and asking targeted questions like "how does this handle when a Foo's approval is revoked" than reading it myself line-by-line. I'm not saying I never use those reading skills but the ability to get the big picture, chase down deep callback chains, know where to look... those skills are likely to atrophy.
It's like using GPS vs. knowing the roads as well as a cabbie. GPS gets you pretty damn far for zero effort.