What separates the highly-skilled developer from the one fresh out of college? Why is it that some developer's code is far easier to maintain and others are nearly impossible to decipher? Both boil down fundamentally to whether you can easily understand the ideas and intent conveyed in their code. So what makes for easily understood code?

There are some communication principles we can apply to our code to make it cheaper to change, and faster to understand. After all Code is read more often than it is written. It ought to be easy to read!