flâneur

How to become a dramatically better programmer

news.ycombinator.com · 4,320 words · saved by 1 readers

Edit: The average piece of code is written once and read hundreds to thousands of times by people. It's not unreasonable to think of code as a read-oriented activity, not a write-oriented activity.

There's one piece of advice specific to programming which is missing from this listing: Read lots of code in lots of different languages. Aim to read, as a general rule, about twice as much code as you write, and to be able to read twice as many languages as you write in typically. Edit: The average piece of code is written once and read hundreds to thousands of times by people. It's not unreasonable to think of code as a read-oriented activity, not a write-oriented activity. This is a suggestion I see given a lot, but something that falls flat to me personally. The analogy I would put…

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