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People don't "read for pleasure" in the programming world; they don't even read To learn—have you ever had a school assignment that charged you with reading mor
by mattyb 16y ago
People don't "read for pleasure" in the programming world; they don't even read To learn—have you ever had a school assignment that charged you with reading more than 1KSLOC? The only reason, as a programmer, I will ever "cd src/", is that I am on a mission to fix a problem.
Seriously? As a programmer, the problem I'm often on a mission to fix in /src is that I haven't learned enough.
- derefr 16y agoYes: you are in a minority within a minority. Of the programmers who read to further their education after school is done with (an already-small number), most will be complacent to read books, or blogs, or at the most journal articles. The number who dive into a foreign codebase—that is, one they have no association with and don't rely on for anything—without the expectation of eventually contributing something (i.e. In OSS) is vanishingly small.
- aaronblohowiak 16y agoRandom rails and jquery plugins tend to be terribly documented and frequently make easy to fix design errors. I read code all the time -- if I am committing it to the repo, I want to be sure I know how it works. For "black box" things I usually won't delve that deep, but if it really needs to integrate, I usually end up reading it sooner or later. My only regret is not pushing more changes back upstream
- what 16y agoI'm with you on this one. I like to understand how things work and how other people approach certain problems. You can find new tricks to add to your bag. Which is also why I like to reinvent the wheel. Waste of time? Maybe, if you don't want to learn anything.