The ability to read other people's code and understand the intent behind it is one of the highest attainments for a professional programmer. It requires two difficult, but important and related capabilities: first, that one be dispassionate enough about one's own views to even accept that other views exist, and second, that one be capable of understanding how code works from reading it (and perhaps interacting with it with a debugger or logging statements).<p>So, rather than lambast people for not being able to read code, perhaps we'd do better to praise those who are particularly good at it, and encourage them to share their insights, if they have them.