One difference is sheer size. One cannot read the necessary code.
Another difference is the goal. The main driver for code reading is decision making.
And then there is this intriguing new evidence:
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The corpus for law and history is far larger than the code for any computer system. Lawyers are always about decision-making. Historians are resolving contradictory sources to decide on an account.
In general, I find it valuable to try to learn from other disciplines. YMMV
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Thinking code is wholly unique from other kinds of writing is kinda arrogant tbh
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It is not arrogant. Also, I was referring to act reading code when it entails more than a few screens. That is not a reading problem. It’s a data problem.
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Do you have any firsthand experience reading law/accounting/history/regulatory/engineering texts?
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My intellect was involved at the time, if that is the question.
But, there is a simpler way to evaluate whether treating code as other kinds of text works:
we tried it as a discipline for half a century;
why do people have so often problems understanding their systems?
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In my experience in (natural) science, the same sort of broad-reaching understanding problems that we have in programming exist in other fields, too. Often, they're worse (because the systems are so much more complex, or because the tooling is much worse, or both).
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I think that there are huge potential advances in how reading is done in other fields, of course! (Again, just extrapolating from my experience with natural science.)
I suspect that the story is more like "we are far from the frontier of possible tools for understanding dense material" in any domain than "reading code is unlike reading material in any other domain of knowledge".
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