morbidhawk

Lately I've been obsessed with the idea of code readability.

I tried out different things, and ended up creating a simple transpiler that allows a new way to organize code that greatly improves readability. It's a fairly simple syntax and is by no means revolutionary, but I can't find a programming paradigm that exactly describes what I'm doing, it is imperative programming but it has a feature I've never seen elsewhere that helps readability. I'm thinking there might be a small group of people out there interested in this, possibly some programmers who have done procedural programming.

I'm not sure the best way to introduce this concept and as I haven't received much feedback yet I'm not sure at what stage of maturity this project would be considered to be.

I'm an introvert and I'm not the entrepreneur type, but with all my wife's and son's medical needs and our student loans I'm realizing that it's important that I find a way to bring in additional income. I have a stable low stress job (which is ideal for my situation right now) with good long term benefits.

My question is what is an effective way to go about introducing this concept, getting feedback, and potentially making some money from it? I don't think anyone would pay to use the transpiler as it is a pretty simple concept. I don't have any experience writing a book about the topic. I don't think open source with donation button would really bring in anything, but open source code is expected by most. And it begs the question though, how mature really is this thing? I can write more readable code now (anecdotal of course) but while it might be ideal to have an end game of eventually a complete readable programming language, that's not something I could accomplish alone and my time is limited. Anyways, if there really isn't an income opportunity around doing this I'd like to find out. Is there a way to either make money off this or get more feedback about how valuable this would be?

I only program my side projects on the weekends, when I come back to the code I realize how poorly it's been written, especially if I've skipped a weekend. I'm really striving to make my code readable. A great book I read is "The Art of Readable Code", and while it focuses on code readability from a micro-level (making a small code sample readable), I find more knowledge is needed to make a program readable when reading it from start to finish.

The code I find most readable is imperative code that can be read line-by-line. I find abstractions hide away important knowledge of understanding completely how things work. Additionally I prefer reading algorithmic code than reading a bunch of helper functions that are at a level of indirection away from understanding the code at hand. For this reason I try to write in more imperative style instead of OOP or functional. But I find that programs I write that can be followed line by line end up having a lot of variables that make it hard to keep track of everything.

I've tried to look for other projects that can be read line by line easily but I haven't found one yet. I'll end up spending way to much time trying to figure out what helper objects, functions, or structs are doing and they require jumping to a bunch of other files while trying to keep in my head what I read previously.

It seems these 2 things are at odds with each other: readable code vs code that can be read and understood completely. I don't want algorithms hidden away but when they are right there in place with the other code it becomes too much.

Is completely readable code even possible? I've heard "abstract just barely as much as you need" or "just use right level of abstraction" but that doesn't give me anything concrete I can do. Is there a project that you know about that was large but very easy for a new person to read and understand completely? Do you know how to write code like that?

Any ideas are appreciated. Thanks!

I'm currently in the interview process for a Mid-level position, but my experience situation is kind of different from most as I interned for several years while going to school to make enough to provide for my family. I've got 1.5 years professional experience after that at the same company. I was asked if I have have the skills of a Mid or maybe somewhere on the fence between Jr and Mid. My current salary requirement needs the pay of a Mid but I don't want to jump into something if it ultimately ends with being put on an improvement plan (that's what I was told would happen). Having no clue how I compare to other Mids, as I work only with Sr devs who know more than me. I told them that I would trust their assessment.

So if I am not up to par with Mid skills, what can I do to get there and be truly qualified? What is the difference between a Mid and a Jr?

The best way I can describe my current ability is that I've been able to recognize that I didn't know all that I thought I did and I try to approach problems and knowledge with no assumptions that I know but rather realize that I can give insight and discuss strategies but I'm not intelligent enough to frequently give the best approach to problems so I definitely discuss approaches and opinions with others to learn from them.

So maybe a better question might be what level are you at once you've discovered you're ignorance and you start to use that to your advantage to really learn stuff (but definitely not someone to write a non-erroneous book on programming topics)?

Any help would be appreciated, thanks!