alt Hacker News> it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion. (That is, it is more work to write than to read!)
This applies to natural language, but, interestingly, the opposite is true of code (in my experience and that of other people that I've discussed it with).
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worble • yesterday at 2:08 AM
See: Kernighan's Law
> Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
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That's because embarrassingly bad writing is useless, while embarrassingly bad code can still make the computer do (roughly) the right thing and lets you tick off a Jira ticket. So we end up having way more room for awful code than for awful prose.
Reading good code can be a better way to learn about something than reading prose. Writing code like that takes some real skill and insight, just like writing clear explanations.