Have you actually experienced a coder that writes good code but writes it in a manner that prevents you from understanding it? I'd love to see some actual code samples.
But the exercise shouldn't stop there, as your program develops questions like yours should be asked and understood and defined. The more questions you can ask yourself, the better you'll understand your thought process.
New developers might not get far past my list. Most devs might ask some but not all of your questions. The best developers will realize more fundamental questions to ask about their decisions. Hopefully everyone can learn something new by asking those questions.
However, in a professional environment you would expect that the lead developer(s) had already given this stuff a lot of serious thought and enshrined it in a coding standards document for every member of the team to follow.
Now, you're right, the easiest questions (as in the article) to answer can and should be encoded in standards document. But there are many many questions to ask and some are highly dependent on context and don't belong in standards documents. Maybe some of the existing standards that you thought you understood are really just there by convention and could be improved.
[1] Or do it at merge time if your setup involves pushing to a "work" repo which is merged to the real codebase later.
This isn't what I understand to be Analysis Paralysis. AP is when you're trying to analyse the problem and design you're trying to code, and you're overwhelmed by the decisions to make and as a result, unable to proceed.
This, in contrast, is about deliberate reflection on what you're doing so you can better make explicit all the otherwise implicit and internal decisions of which you may otherwise be unaware.
As the article says, coders make hundreds of decisions for every routine they write, most on auto-pilot. Some of those might be less than optimal, and this kind of examination and reflection can help to understand, and possibly improve, those decisions.
[1] Minor edit in the light of subsequent comments.
[2] Hat tip to The Princess Bride
Why is this idea true?
Do I really believe it?
Could I convince someone else that it is true?
Why didn't the author use a different argument?
Do I have a better argument or method of explaining the idea?
Why didn't the author explain it the way that I understand it?
Is my way wrong?
Do I really get the idea?
Am I missing some subtlety?
Did this author miss a subtlety?
If I can't understand the point, perhaps I can understand a similar but simpler idea?
Which simpler idea?
Is it really necessary to understand this idea?
Can I accept this point without understanding the details of why it is true?
Will my understanding of the whole story suffer from not understanding why the point is true?
-- How To Read Mathematics, authors Shai Simonson and Fernando Gouvea [1]
[1]http://web.stonehill.edu/compsci/History_Math/math-read.htm#
After years of coding one develops their coding personality that they're happy with and I think their code has just a right mix of carelessness and precision which could be never learned from a script kiddie book.
Point being that most people probably don't get the most out of, say, Python's standard library.
