You Don't Read Code, You Explore It
It is an interesting observation. I expect it is the difference in expertise though. The author compares reading code snippets in Dr. Dobbs (which dates them probably 10 or 15 years ago) to reading stories.Here is the thing, everything you read in a story is supposed to convey imagery of things like what you may have already experienced, they are already internalized, you "see" them when you read as if you were there.Allow me to use another popular space as an example, music. When you are first reading sheet music, you see notes on a stave, key signatures, different shapes representing different durations. At first you mechanically take that understanding and laboriously turn it into actions on your instrument. But after a while, if you do it enough, the shapes become recognizable as rhythms, the tones in the staves become tones not symbols, and then you stop "reading" music, you look at it and you can hear what it will sound like. And by that time you can make your instrument do what ever you hear.Coding is not entirely different, at some point you don't see syntax, you see algorithm, you see inter-relationships of data structures, you see flow. After a number of years of coding I got to the point where I could see what code was doing pretty easily (except for obfuscated code which is always jarring on first look). I stop seeing code loops and start seeing iterative processing, if statements are branches on a path.Anything in words or symbols, is code for something else. Whether its a murder mystery, a symphony, or a sorting algorithm the words and symbols are there to express the idea inside your head you can understand it, I think it is all reading though :-)