It's easy to make measurements of literature. It just turns out that word length and sentence structure and number of chapters aren't that interesting. Most of what gets measured when it comes to code is similar, it's just that it is easy to automate the measurement.
The sorts of things that are hard to measure for literature, like impacts on the lives of individuals, are also hard to measure in code. So code measures what isn't hard rather than what is important (and tends to elevate what is easy to measure to importance as best industry practice). To put it another way, we don't go around measuring how much more emphatic I become after checking in on Yelp, snapchatting my BFF, or listening to fifteen minutes of Ginger Baker Radio on Pandora.
Maybe it is just because our expectations for code are so much lower. And maybe our expectations are so much lower because we don't treat code as literature. We accept code that doesn't change us and our view of the world as good code. Sorting an array quickly is held up as good code despite not having much impact on how we look at the world.
The sorts of things that are hard to measure for literature, like impacts on the lives of individuals, are also hard to measure in code. So code measures what isn't hard rather than what is important (and tends to elevate what is easy to measure to importance as best industry practice). To put it another way, we don't go around measuring how much more emphatic I become after checking in on Yelp, snapchatting my BFF, or listening to fifteen minutes of Ginger Baker Radio on Pandora.
Maybe it is just because our expectations for code are so much lower. And maybe our expectations are so much lower because we don't treat code as literature. We accept code that doesn't change us and our view of the world as good code. Sorting an array quickly is held up as good code despite not having much impact on how we look at the world.