Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective

Preface

What do we ever get nowadays from reading to equal the excitement and the revelation in those first fourteen years?

—Graham Greene

The reading of code is likely to be one of the most common activities of a computing professional, yet it is seldom taught as a subject or formally used as a method for learning how to design and program.

One reason for this sad situation originally may have been the lack of real-world or high-quality code to read. Companies often protect source code as a trade secret and rarely allow others to read, comment on, experiment with, and learn from it. In the few cases where important proprietary code was allowed out of a company's closet, it spurred enormous interest and creative advancements. As an example, ...