The Shape of Code

I’m rather late with my list of Christmas books for 2010. While I do have a huge stack of books waiting to be read I don’t seem to have read many books this year (I have been reading lots of rather technical blogs this year, i.e., time/thought consuming ones) and there is only one book I would strongly recommend.

Anybody with even the slightest of interest in code readability needs to read
Reading in the Brain by Stanislaw Dehaene (the guy who wrote The Number Sense, another highly recommended book). The style of the book is half way between being populist and being an undergraduate text.

Most of the discussion centers around the hardware/software processing that takes place in what Dehaene refers to as the letterbox area of the brain (in the left occipito-temporal cortex). The hardware being neurons in the human brain and software being the connections between them (part genetically hardwired and part selectively learned as the brain’s owner goes through childhood; Dehaene is not a software developer and does not use this hardware/software metaphor).

As any engineer knows, knowledge of the functional characteristics of a system are essential when designing other systems to work with it. Reading this book will help people separate out the plausible from the functionally implausible in discussions about code readability.

Time and again the reading process has co-opted brain functionality that appears to have been designed to perform other activities. During the evolution of writing there also seems to have been some adaptation to existing processes in the brain; a lesson here for people designing code visualizations tools.

In my C book I tried to provide an overview of the reading process but skipped discussing what went on in the brain, partly through ignorance on my part and also a belief that we were a long way from having an accurate model. Dehaene’s book clearly shows that a good model of what goes on in the brain during reading is now available.