Quotes & Sayings About Readability

Designers provide ways into - and out of - the flood of words by breaking up text into pieces and offering shortcuts and alternate routes through masses of information. ( ... ) Although many books define the purpose of typography as enhancing the readability of the written word, one of design's most humane functions is, in actuality, to help readers avoid reading. — Ellen Lupton

It seems certain that much of the success of Unix follows from the readability, modifiability, and portability of its software. — Dennis Ritchie

I have been giving the best of my advice to this project since 1975. At first I was extremely hopeful. The original objectives of the language included reliability, readability of programs, formality of language definition, and even simplicity. Gradually these objectives have been sacrificed in favor of power, supposedly achieved by a plethora of features and notational conventions, many of them unnecessary and some of them, like exception handling, even dangerous ...
It is not too late! I believe that by careful pruning of the ADA language, it is still possible to select a very powerful subset that would be reliable and efficient in implementation and safe and economic in use. The sponsors of the language have declared unequivocally, however, that there shall be no subsets. This is the strangest paradox of the whole strange project. If you want a language with no subsets, you must make it small. — C.A.R. Hoare

What really makes for readability is not clarity but attitude: the attitude of your prose toward out elusive friend the Reader and the role you invent for that invented being in your invented world. — Stephen Koch

What's the number-one thing people do on the Web? They read. Words and numbers are the raw material from which the vast majority of webpages are built. If reading is the primary activity on the Web, then readability is a primary function of Web design. — Gerry McGovern

XML combines the efficiency of text files with the readability of binary files — Andrew S. Tanenbaum

It must be said that today, at the end of its semantic evolution, the word 'terrorist' is an intrinsically propagandistic term. It has no neutral readability. It dispenses with all reasoned examination of political situations, of their causes and consequences. — Alain Badiou

There is a difference between art and life and that difference is readability. — Marian Engel

As far as he can achieve it, readability is as important for the scientific writer as it is for the novelist. — Donald O. Hebb

[Perl] combines all the worst aspects of C and Lisp: a billion different sublanguages in one monolithic executable. It combines the power of C with the readability of PostScript. — Jamie Zawinski

Perhaps you thought that "getting it working" was the first order of business for a professional developer. I hope by now, however, that this book has disabused you of that idea. The functionality that you create today has a good chance of changing in the next release, but the readability of your code will have a profound effect on all the changes that will ever be made. — Robert C. Martin

The photograph is an incomplete utterance, a message that depends on some external matrix of conditions and presuppositions for its readability. — Allan Sekula

Clarity need not be equivalent to / readability. How readable is the world? — Rae Armantrout

My first job in Brazil was actually to develop a way to improve the readability of billboards, and based on speed, angle of approach and actually blocks of text. It was very - actually, it was a very good study, and got me a job in an ad agency. And they also decided that I had to - to give me a very ugly Plexiglas trophy for it. — Vik Muniz

Readability of code is now my first priority. It's more important than being fast, almost as important as being correct, but I think being readable is actually the most likely way of making it correct. — Peter Seibel

Those who declared librarians obsolete when the Internet rage first appeared are now red-faced. We need them more than ever. The Internet is full of 'stuff' but its value and readability is often questionable. 'Stuff' doesn't give you a competitive edge, high-quality related information does. — Patricia Schroeder

The YA category is an entirely new one, and seems to have more to do with readability than with age group or theme. The adult YA readers I know do actually consistently say that they are looking for an easy read, a fun read, an unchallenging read. — Russell Smith

Typography is two-dimensional architecture, based on experience and imagination, and guided by rules and readability. — Hermann Zapf

THOMAS JEFFERSON LEFT POSTERITY an immense correspondence, and I am particularly indebted to The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, published by Princeton University Press and first edited by Julian P. Boyd. I am, moreover, grateful to the incumbent editors of the Papers, especially general editor Barbara B. Oberg, for sharing unpublished transcripts of letters gathered for future volumes. The goal of the Princeton edition was, and continues to be, "to present as accurate a text as possible and to preserve as many of Jefferson's distinctive mannerisms of writing as can be done." To provide clarity and readability for a modern audience, however, I have taken the liberty of regularizing much of the quoted language from Jefferson and from his contemporaries. I have, for instance, silently corrected Jefferson's frequent use of "it's" for "its" and "recieve" for "receive," and have, in most cases, expanded contractions and abbreviations and followed generally accepted practices of capitalization. — Jon Meacham