111–120 of 188 posts
Still I'm more likely to find myself browsing wikipedia for math and cs
Peter Seibel, the author of the Coders at Work book mentioned in the post, actually discussed this in a blog post: http://www.gigamonkeys.com/code-reading/ It's not quite true that none of the programmers interviewed in the book routinely read code for fun. In his blog post, Seibel mentions the exceptions: > First, when I did my book of interviews with programmers, Coders at Work, I asked pretty much everyone about c…
I sometimes wonder whether a lot of Knuth's greatness comes from doing more of the stuff everyone knows they should do but don't. If you read this interview (https://github.com/kragen/knuth-interview-2006) with Knuth, he talks about how he was nervous he wouldn't be able to learn calculus so just decided to do all the problems instead of just the assigned ones. Unsurprisingly, partly because he's Knuth and we all know Knuth can do math, he ends up really good at calculus: > But Thomas’s Calculus would have the text, then would have problems, and our teacher would assign, say, the even numbered problems, or something like that. I would also do the odd numbered problems. In the back of Thomas’s book he had supplementary problems, the teacher didn’t assign the supplementary problems; I worked the supplementary problems. I was, you know, I was scared I wouldn’t learn calculus, so I worked hard on it, and it turned out that of course it took me longer to solve all these problems than the kids who were only working on what was assigned, at first. But after a year, I could do all of those problems in the same time as my classmates were doing the assigned problems, and after that I could just coast in mathematics, because I’d learned how to solve problems. So it was good that I was scared, in a way that I, you know, that made me start strong, and then I could coast afterwards, rather than always climbing and being on a lower part of the learning curve.
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…
The second part, knowing what the code the function is calling does, is nearly impossible when they are other functions in the program itself.
The thing about code reading for me is you have to have decent tooling. It's pointless reading code in Github, especially for a codebase you are not familiar with, you need to get the codebase open in an IDE to be able to dive in quickly and back again to build the map out in your head. I don't think you can read a portion of code from top to bottom without having tooling....unless the piece of code is really short a…
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…
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.
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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....)
I have only been coding for 1.5 years and this kind of comment is validating what I worry is a very bad habit. I hate using dependencies unless they have reached a certain level of legend in the community.
One of the things that sets a good programmer apart is the willingness to fearlessly dig into someone else's code. I've heard it said before that you're responsible for every line of code you ship to your users. It follows that you shouldn't treat your dependencies as black boxes. Getting a stack trace that's 3 or 4 levels deep in Django/React/ ? Dig under the covers and understand what's happening. Include that info…
Argument like this almost justifies leaky abstractions as something to be praised.
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Of course you can expand this to be unreasonable - you could also make a strawman argument about how you need to understand all the compilers, OS APIs, and chip architectures that support your product. Obviously, that's not what I'm saying. I'm making a few assumptions: the code you're depending on was written by people like you (e.g. other open source volunteers with expertise in the same language as you); the limit…
> It's probably not as scary as you think it is; after all, it was written by other people like you. Most interesting code has been written by people smarter than me (the kernel, compositing window manager, network stack, web rendering engine, virtual machine, etc.), and while reading that code probable isn't intractable, it would take me decades of effort to understand. At the same time, I think I can be an effectiv…