I’ve written the first follow-up to Properties of Code: Functional Complexity about 3 times now and have scrapped it 3 times. Every attempt has been less “mathy” than the start of the series; each has contained an interesting point or two, but those nuggets get buried under a mountain of meandering.
The biggest hinderance has been that there has been too much “feeling” and “guess work” in my efforts. My desire to show a relationship between Functional (or, more precisely, Satisfaction) complexity and Kolmogorov complexity provided a pretty clear path for me to follow. Readability is a bit more vague.
What I need is more empirical data to direct my thoughts and efforts. I have some hypotheses, some suspicions and very little data. Espousing a position without the backing of mathematical formalisms or strong data makes me uneasy, and that tends to lead to a rambling and incoherent narrative. I do find something amusing in the fact that my efforts at writing on readability have, thus far, been virtually unreadable.
As I am a single-task kind of guy, I feel compelled to work out my thoughts on readability before moving on to anything else. However, it is pretty clear to me that doing so will totally stall this site. So, rather than fixate on writing a narrative around claims I cannot support at this time, I’m going to list my thoughts and start collecting data. Once I have some meaningful data to work with, I’ll dig into it and see what comes out. If I find support for my claims, great. If the data refutes some or all of my thoughts, even better. This will give me something to work from and hopefully produce a much more meaningful essay than the shit I’ve attempted to cobble together so far.
At any rate, here are my suspicions, naked and, for all intents and purposes, completely unfounded at this time:
- Any link between Kolmogorov Complexity and Readability is a trivial one (eg: a program has high Kolmogorov complexity and is unreadable because it is nearly a random string of characters.)
- The link between a “readable” story and “readable” code is probably stronger, but the two are not equivalent.
- The visualization of quantitative data has implications in readability of code, and potentially the readability of programming languages.
- Code produces two products: a solution to some problem to be consumed by users, and the code itself, to be consumed by developers. Writing code that only solves the problem is a partial victory.
Now that I’ve put a few thoughts out there, I’m mentally free to think about, and write on other topics, while I collect data and look for evidence.