1. Code for human consumption
It is one of the most pervasive misunderstandings in computing that the source code is for the computer’s consumption. Computers work with low-level binary code, a series of impenetrable 1’s and 0’s or hexadecimal numbers, not the structured high level languages we code in. The reason that these languages were developed was to help the programmer.
In practice, coding for human consumption often means coding for clarity first, over efficiency and speed second.
2. Comment often and comment well
The comment is the extreme example of a language element for human consumption. Most compilers will
…