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Nobody reads other people's code for fun. Not true for me. I /love/ reading code from great engineers. I've learned a lot doing so.

ef4 14y ago
Yeah, agreed. Writing good source code despite not liking to read source is about as likely as writing a great novel despite not liking books. And like reading books, it only became enjoyable when you reach a level of fluency. Sadly lots of developers never get there, and so they go through convolutions to avoid reading code.
spacemanaki 14y ago
Yeah I think he's really off-base there, and the rest of the paragraph is wrong too: "The idea that you'd settle down in a deep leather chair with your smoking jacket and a snifter of brandy for a fine evening of reading through someone else's code is absurd." Absurd? It's basically what I did recently with ClojureScript One, replacing brandy with beer and deep leather chair with kitchen table and chair. I found it very enjoyable and enlightening. And I'm not trying to brag, I really don't think this is a mark of anything special. IIRC publishing and highlighting code that was interesting to read was one of the goals that Peter Seibel wanted to tackle with Code Quarterly (which didn't pan out, but still, he didn't think it was an absurd suggestion). I also seem to recall reading code being something a lot of the people interviewed in Coders At Work described as being valuable. And one of the stock questions Seibel asked everyone in that book was if they had tried literate programming ("a la Knuth"), which is really just a way to make large pieces of code easier to be read by someone else. All's to say, absurd it clearly is not.
egonschiele 14y ago
I like reading code from great engineers too. But most of the code I read is by pretty good to mediocre engineers. Nobody likes reading code by mediocre engineers.
icefox 14y ago
Same here. If I find a project that upon inspection has some interesting source code I will often sit down and just read through it. I often end up learning a trick or two and by reading it I typically understand the system better and so when using it can take full advantage of what is there.

ef4 14y ago

Yeah, agreed. Writing good source code despite not liking to read source is about as likely as writing a great novel despite not liking books. And like reading books, it only became enjoyable when you reach a level of fluency. Sadly lots of developers never get there, and so they go through convolutions to avoid reading code.

spacemanaki 14y ago

Yeah I think he's really off-base there, and the rest of the paragraph is wrong too: "The idea that you'd settle down in a deep leather chair with your smoking jacket and a snifter of brandy for a fine evening of reading through someone else's code is absurd." Absurd? It's basically what I did recently with ClojureScript One, replacing brandy with beer and deep leather chair with kitchen table and chair. I found it very enjoyable and enlightening. And I'm not trying to brag, I really don't think this is a mark of anything special. IIRC publishing and highlighting code that was interesting to read was one of the goals that Peter Seibel wanted to tackle with Code Quarterly (which didn't pan out, but still, he didn't think it was an absurd suggestion). I also seem to recall reading code being something a lot of the people interviewed in Coders At Work described as being valuable. And one of the stock questions Seibel asked everyone in that book was if they had tried literate programming ("a la Knuth"), which is really just a way to make large pieces of code easier to be read by someone else. All's to say, absurd it clearly is not.

egonschiele 14y ago

I like reading code from great engineers too. But most of the code I read is by pretty good to mediocre engineers. Nobody likes reading code by mediocre engineers.

icefox 14y ago

Same here. If I find a project that upon inspection has some interesting source code I will often sit down and just read through it. I often end up learning a trick or two and by reading it I typically understand the system better and so when using it can take full advantage of what is there.