Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming

by Peter Seibel

But I think if a program is well written, there will be something about its structure that will guide me to various parts of it in an order that will make some kind of sense. You know, it's not just what the program does—there's a story. There's a story about how the program is organized, there's a story about the context in which the program is expected to operate. And one would hope that there will be something about the program, whether it's block comments at the start of each routine or an overview document that comes separately or just choices of variable names that will somehow convey those stories to you. And one would hope that a good programmer, a really good programmer, will have given thought to conveying those stories in addition to the story of what the program actually does.

Steele