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Comment by olavk | Hacker News Reader

Ulysses is not unreadable, it just takes a lot of effort. For programming, the criteria is not if it is hard to read, but whether the same thing could be expressed in way that would be simpler and easier to read. But I not sure to what extent this could be applied to poetry, since the expression in language is in itself "the thing".

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"Unreadable" in this whole discussion should be taken as meaning "requires effort that the reader is not willing to expend", not an absolute. There are very few things that are impossible to read at all, even the notoriously and deliberately unintelligible stunt languages like INTERCAL and brainfk.

I'd even go so far to say that the only way something can be literally unreadable is if it is physically impossible to do so (e.g. unrecoverable data) or there is not yet any known way of determining the meaning of a given text (e.g. the Voynich manuscript).

But of course that isn't what is meant when we say something is unreadable because humans don't deal in absolutes (though programmers sometimes do, which is why programmers are so fond of using overly noncommital language like "should" and "most likely").

Only in the context of writing as an art form.

There are many other scenarios where writing is used as tool simply to convey meaning. Like this comment.

Yeah. If you wrote a comment in the style of Ulysses (at least, in one of several of the styles used there), I'm not going to bother trying to read it. It may be something profound said very well, but I still am going to err on the side of assuming that it's a waste of my time.

And if you write your code in the equivalent of the style of Ulysses, well, let's just say that having PhD dissertations several decades from now that try to explain exactly what your code means is not the same as code readability.

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