> It's in part laziness - reading and understanding someone else's code takes a lot of focused effort. But it's also a matter of gratification - writing code is

> It's in part laziness - reading and understanding someone else's code takes a lot of focused effort. But it's also a matter of gratification - writing code is far more satisfying (IMO) than reading and comprehending others'. No, it is rather the problem that other people's source code changes all the time. If the other programmer can assure me that his source code is good enough that it can be used for 10-20 years without any problems (and will be maintained this long time) and the only changes that will happen are small bugfixes, I can easily be convinced to read into all the gory details of it (of course only if the source code is useful), since I know that the knowledge that I gain by diving into these details will help me for many years after. The situation that we have is that every few months a new framework comes out and such a deep reading into is not worth it since in a few month something new will come and in few years the original framework will be forgotten, making all the investment into understanding it deeply worthless.