gnisrap
The cognitive process of creating a mental model of a computer program by reading the code.
uncountable
A similar account is offered by the ‘parsing/gnisrap’ theory of computer programming Green et al. (1987). Programming, they argue, involves two processes: parsing, the generation of external code structures from internal cognitive structures, and gnisrap (the reverse of parsing), which involves the recreation of internal structures from code during code comprehension.
Where it comes from
From parsing spelled backwards, coined by the British cognitive scientist Thomas R. G. Green (born 1941) and his co-authors Rachel K. E. Bellamy and J. M. Parker in a 1987 paper: see the quotation.
Adapted from the Wiktionary entry gnisrap (CC BY-SA 4.0).