Why Code Readability is important

If you struggle to read the code, how the hell are you meant to fix it #HoskWisdom

Code readability is an important quality of good code, it’s a subjective topic which varies between developers.

If code is easy to read, it will be easy to understand and easy to debug, maintain and extend. Writing complicated code is easy, writing simple code is harder and takes longer.

Learning to make code readable/understandable is difficult for inexperienced developers because it can be difficult to quantify the differences between readable code and un-readable code.

You can spot good code and bad code but when asked to explain why some code is good and other code is bad a lot of developers will shrug there shoulders and just say “Because it is”. Similar to when you know something isn’t right, it doesn’t feel right but you are not sure why.

Why is code readability important?

When a developer initially writes the code their knowledge of the system is very detailed because usually they have worked on the project for some time, read requirement/technical specs. They know the code/related code, they know the system, everything is in harmony.