Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming

by Peter Seibel

Seibel: Have you ever found that code that was, at that level, a mess, then you cleaned it all up and discovered it was actually good code underneath? Crockford: I've never actually seen that. I think it's really difficult to write good code in a sloppy manner. By good code, I mean it's going to be readable. At one level, it doesn't matter what it does to a machine if I can't figure out what it does, so it might turn out that the code is amazing in terms of its efficiency, or its compactness, or some other metric which I don't care about. Readability of code is now my first priority. It's more important than being fast, almost as important as being correct, but I think being readable is actually the most likely way of making it correct. So I think it's probably not good code and they probably made the wrong trade-offs if the code turned out to be in the state that it's not easily readable.