Comment by sothatsit

You have misunderstood this "common wisdom".

The idea is that people will spend 10x more time reading your code in all future time stacked together. Not that reading and understanding your code once takes 10x the effort of writing it, which is obviously untrue.

Here is the quote from Clean Code, where this idea seems to originate from:

> Indeed, the ratio of time spent reading versus writing code is well over 10 to 1.