re: Writing code for both computers and humans
This is a reply to Tony Mottaz' blog post about code that's easy to understand for humans.
The understandability of a piece of code can be measured by how much time one needs to grasp its behavior. Less cognitive load usually means easier, and therefore faster, to understand.
Tony argues that the verbose version of the code (isNaN(defaultValue) ? NaN : defaultValue;) is better than the optimized version (defaultValue;) because it proves that the author has thought of the possible sideeffect.
However, I personally think this is in fact bad code. Although the code is trying to make obvious what it's doing, Tony had to pause and think about why it's written this way. This probably interrupted their flow of work, which is highly undesired. A short comment should have the same effect while keeping the reader in their flow. This is a perfect example for the "comment the why, now the how" mantra.
I really enjoyed Tony's post. It does a great job emphasizing that we should be curious about the code we read and write.
This is post 086 of #100DaysToOffload.