We spend roughly 10x as much time reading code as we do writing it. A tool or technique that makes you twice as "productive" at writing code *at best* makes you 5% more productive over all. Making your code easier to understand will have 10x the impact. But that doesn't sell tools or put developers out of work, so you won't be reading about it in Forbes.

@jasongorman "We spend roughly 10x as much time reading code as we do writing it."

Interesting! Is that based on empirical data? I had not looked at it this way.

@guusdk @jasongorman I was going to ask the same thing. I'm really not sure this is true, it certainly doesn't "feel" true, unless you count reading the code you are actively writing. Certainly this depends on the kind of project.
@aesthetikx @guusdk Record yourself "coding" for a day on a production system