Your Code as a Crime Scene

Learn About the Negative Space in Code

Virtually all programming languages use whitespace as indentation to improve readability. (Even Brainf***^[19] programs seem to use it, despite the goal implied by the language’s name.) Indentation correlates with the code’s shape. So instead of focusing on the code itself, we’ll look at what’s not there, the negative space. We’ll use indentation as a proxy for complexity.

The idea of indentation as a proxy for complexity is backed by research. (See the research in Reading Beside the Lines: Indentation as a Proxy for Complexity Metric. Program Comprehension, 2008. ICPC 2008. The 16th IEEE International Conference ...