Programming from the Reader's Perspective: Toward an Expectations Approach

Abstract

There are many guidelines for composing programs, but few methodologies take into account the expectations readers have when reading an unfamiliar program. As a result, code that seems well-written and clear to the developer might not be read and interpreted by the reader in the way the programmer expected. We conducted a survey of Java programmers to determine how a program's structure may signal subjective cues to the reader. We found that the use of meaning-preserving program refactorings had a measurable effect on what readers believed the programmer's main intention was.