Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective

Foreword

We're programmers. Our job (and in many cases our passion) is to make things happen by writing code. We don't meet our user's requirements with acres of diagrams, with detailed project schedules, with four-foot-high piles of design documentation. These are all wishes—expressions of what we'd like to be true. No, we deliver by writing code: code is reality.

So that's what we're taught. Seems reasonable. Our job is to write code, so we need to learn how to write code. College courses teach us to to write programs. Training courses tell us how to code to new libraries and APIs. And that's one of the biggest tragedies in the industry.

Because the way to learn to write great code is by reading code. Lots of code. High-quality code, low-quality ...