How to read code

Just a tiny insight I had. You don't "read" code as if it were a story or an article —unless you are used to reading those "analytically" too. When you read code you don't do it in a linear way, you have to go connecting dots, more than reading line by line: you see a variable declaration, ok, where else does this variable show up? You see a function definition and you ask: when does this function run, what conditions make it run, what parameters does it take and when it runs, where do those parameters come from?

You don't just go top to bottom, you go back and forth, looking at the code from above and then diving deep inside the concentric scopes, then jumping back out.

Maybe it's my background in literature that until now I thought I could read it linearly, am I the only one that just realized this? I don't think so because I've seen other tutorials or courses in coding that teach you by grabing a full program and then analyzing it, but they make the same mistake, they start going throught the code line by line, top to bottom. Even the "code along" type of tutorials very often do this, they start coding from the top and just go straight down; they do this because the code they are teaching you is pre-written and now the youtuber is just folowing along. If they are a good teacher —and there are many, for sure— they'll go along explaining the thought process and what each part does. But still I think most of the time they are not really illustrating what the real workflow of creating a program looks like.

When a programmer sits down to write a script, it's rarely a clean, straight-forward top-to-bottom sequence. It may start with a few variables, then a function, then another variable, then extend that function, then encase the function in a loop, then create a class, then rewrite the function as a method of that class, etc... but here's the kicker: each stage that gets rewritten is not just wrong or incomplete, it's part of the process... I'm just making things up, but do you understand what I mean? It looks a lot more like the analytical reading, but in reverse.