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Nobody's just reading your code

akkartik.name

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Re: Nobody's just reading your code

#71

Post by pm215 »

alister wrote: post #67

Reading code just for fun was a thing in the early and mid years of UNIX (eg., 7th edition or System V). People eagerly passed around faint 10th generation photocopies of Lion's printout of and commentary[1] on the UNIX source code. The annual USENIX conference had a popular short course in which they went through the entire UNIX kernel line by line. Why was that a thing back then and not now? Certainly UNIX was an a…

I suspect in a lot of cases reading the Lions commentaries was not purely for fun. The original audience (Lions' students) were doing it as part of their university course. Many of the contemporary readers would have been reading it because they needed to understand, fix bugs or add features to their unix systems (I think one of the introductions in the reprint book is from somebody who was in this position). But you're right I'm sure that the the key was the combination of (a) real world and genuinely useful code that the readers were using (b) size such that you could realistically understand all of it (c) excellent accompanying code commentary.

I read through the Lions book in the late 1990s when the reprint came out, essentially "just for fun" -- it remains probably the only sizeable piece of code I've read for fun.

Re: Nobody's just reading your code

#72

Post by PeterisP »

yoz-y wrote: post #54
rudasn wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

7. (next morning) Fork the project, apply your PR and any others you like, and use your fork in your codebase. 8. (optional) Thank the creators and maintainers for the time and effort they put into it.

This is not always an optimal solution. Because by doing this you have essentially became a maintainer of a dependency you initially wanted to 'just' use.

Well, that's kind of the point - (almost) everybody wants to just use the dependencies, but someone must maintain them for the community to work.

Re: Nobody's just reading your code

#73

Post by ralusek »

antirez wrote: post #62

This is a bit western centric maybe, because I see Chinese developers reading tons of code, to the point that I receive an incredible amount of Redis PRs about conceptual bugs that can never happen in practice, since some Chinese developer is reading the code and doing the math in her/his head.

That's interesting, but also not so surprising. China has had decades of directing primary engineering/manufacturing efforts towards reverse engineering western products, or executing specific designs specified from western clients. The attitude of looking to someone else's engineering to learn from it is probably something the rest of us could do a bit more of.

Re: Nobody's just reading your code

#74

Post by heavenlyblue »

icebraining wrote: post #42
taeric wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't let survivorship and confirmation bias cloud your judgment. What sets many successful people apart is not any one thing, but that they were successful. Many are willing to dive into other people's code in methods that are far deeper than I can comprehend, and yet they have failed at whatever task they were going about. So, yes. By and large, you shouldn't stop at your dependency boundaries. However, your job is…

Forking is not that bad, unless upstream has a lot of activity yet takes a long time to accept patches. Many projects are mostly dormant, so keeping a patchset and occasionally rebasing is easy enough. We use git-aggregator[1] for easily applying pending PRs/MRs over the upstream branch, and for the most part, conflicts are rare. [1] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/git-aggregator

The thing I find with python/ruby ecosystems - is that the versions are generally pinned, so if you do fork a change for your specific need; you'll end up using it for the project. If the change isn't merged - then at least you may use it yourself.

Re: Nobody's just reading your code

#75

Post by heavenlyblue »

antirez wrote: post #62

This is a bit western centric maybe, because I see Chinese developers reading tons of code, to the point that I receive an incredible amount of Redis PRs about conceptual bugs that can never happen in practice, since some Chinese developer is reading the code and doing the math in her/his head.

Any case you could share a link to one of these, if possible? A matter of curiosity.

Re: Nobody's just reading your code

#76

Post by pjmlp »

mjevans wrote: post #21

One of the reasons I love golang* is how the entire source code for the standard library is just a few easy clicks away from the documentation on how to use it. As an example: When I want to do something and the interfaces I'm seeing provide friction (XML parsing not /quite/ handling normal, slightly incorrect, HTML) I can get a better idea of what the library is doing behind the scenes. I got an example of how to us…

Smalltalk did it first and I have always been able to do it with C++, Java and Python as well.

Re: Nobody's just reading your code

#77

Post by heavenlyblue »

encoderer wrote: post #10

I’d like to spend more time reading great code. I think I’d get something out of it. Possibly more important, though, I’ve always had a fearlessness to dive into a codebase. I’ve built a little thing called Cronitor and recently I was giving a talk on building our first server agent in Go. Long story short, there were a few people surprised that I studied a couple crond implementations to figure out some important de…

I agree with you - there are many details that are either missing from the documentation or the books on the topic. Actually reading the code usually provides the necessary _practical_ structures used in the real projects.

One of the counter-examples had been the implementation of egalitarian paxos for me: when I had first read the paper I've thought that I didn't understand a lot. By reading throught the code written by the actual author I had realised that the paper by itself described something quite far away from a practically working prototype; So it wasn't my understanding of the paper in the first place that was the problem.

Re: Nobody's just reading your code

#78

Post by sgtmas2006 »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #58
RobertRoberts wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is sadly why I keep my dependencies to a minimum. After coding for almost 20 years now, full time, I have never regretted not using a dependency. But I have regretted using one multiple times. (the regret is like a walk of shame during the "separation and cleanup" phase at the end, which makes me question the "got work done faster" phase at the beginning....)

In 20 years you've never started work on something and after a bit said damn it I think I'll use that library that other guy developed? If you've ever switched out dependency X for dependency Y I suppose you regretted not using Y to begin with. If you've ever stopped working on your own solution to a problem and instead used a solution provided in a library didn't you regret not just using the library from the beginn…

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I've abandoned writing something to use a dependency in place that got the job done, but could have a number of improvements.

Re: Nobody's just reading your code

#79

Post by chukye »

Once I propose for a team to read the code of Redux before adding it to the codebase (if you don't know, redux is a very small libraries, very easy to read). But no one seemed to care, they was just saying things like "Well, I'll read this blog post that teach us how to use it", and I was like: "BUT, if you read the code You will know exactly how to use it! Why not go to the source instead of read other people opinions?!"

Re: Nobody's just reading your code

#80

Post by Klathmon »

alister wrote: post #67

Reading code just for fun was a thing in the early and mid years of UNIX (eg., 7th edition or System V). People eagerly passed around faint 10th generation photocopies of Lion's printout of and commentary[1] on the UNIX source code. The annual USENIX conference had a popular short course in which they went through the entire UNIX kernel line by line. Why was that a thing back then and not now? Certainly UNIX was an a…

This is still done today, just with other software.

I've read blog posts that go through the entire redux javascript library line by line, or review an entire chunk of React.

Even just yesterday here on HN was a submission that just contained shaders from Wolfenstein.

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