Might just be independent discovery, but the main idea of this blog post is more or less the exact theory advanced in the recent book "The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet" by Bogna Konior (https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Forest-Theory-Internet-Redux/dp/...).
Most reasonably skilled programmers can read code. They choose not to. Cultural problem not technical one.
I've been in the industry a long time and the best codebases I've seen had a handful of things in common:
* They were written by highly competent programmers who all had an interest in doing a good job.
* The code was neat, well-document, and sensibly structured based on agreed upon standards.
* The programmers writing them weren't forced to inject changes faster than they could compensate for them.
That's it. Most of the disasters in industry are the result of extrinsic demands. People not caring or people. People documenting nothing. People under extreme deadline pressure hammering in something that then has massive, long-term design ripple effects on the rest of the codebase. Do this several dozen times and you're almost certain to produce a disaster and some point.
Therefore, most software problems have to do with people in over their heads or making changes haphazardly to meet deadlines. These cultural issues seem largely to stem from people thinking that writing software is a deterministic process - it isn't, and has more in common with chaotic systems than linear deterministic systems. Hell, I've written virtually the exact same piece of software twice at one company and each time produced both identical bugs and completely new bugs.
We would probably benefit more from understanding what software actually is and educating people about that than attempt to technologize away our problematic understanding of technology.</screed>