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Serious question for Jeff - If I gave you a 500,000 line app (any language) with zero documentation and asked you to start adding features and fixing bugs, you

• adrianhoward 15y ago
  Serious question for Jeff - If I gave you a 500,000 line app (any language) with zero documentation and asked you to start adding features and fixing bugs, you'd be cool with that because you had "the source"? I'm not Jeff - but that situation has occurred multiple times in my career. Along with the more problematic one of there being documentation, and there being serious discrepancies between the docs and the code. I like to have both by preference, but if I had to pick one I'd pick the source. I can figure out what it does from the code. I can't figure out the bugs from the docs. Both of these situations outnumber the times I've had large code bases with good accurate documentation. Also, how did you get so far in your career as an MS developer with such limited access to source code? I'm not an MS developer, but from those I know there seems to have been pretty wide access to lots of source for some years now - you just can't fix and re-distribute it :-)