Benoit, I would very much like to read source code more often, as I suspect would many others, but I think the problem lies in the fact that few coders or publishers seem to think that code is worth studying. I know that sounds outrageous but the simple fact is that there are many intellectual artefacts as difficult as source code that are published and read avidly - e.g., scientific articles, mathematical proofs, philosophical essays, musicological analysis, poetry, etc. in these fields publication is considered essential to the culture and energy and creativity is found to typeset and edit these artefacts. In programming, the written analysis of programme design only ever seems to happen in computer science textbooks, such as SICP, etc.
I am often curious enough to look at the source code of some library, but are usually discouraged by the lack of organisation in the presentation. Object oriented code is particularly hard to get a handle on, compared to structured programme examples in textbooks, as there an awful lot of boilerplate that obscures the architecture. Technical documentation seems to be the only way to get a mental map but it is often a dry overview that fails to capture the thought process that went into the design. Sometimes I'm lead to the melancholy conclusion that programme analysis -- I mean analysis in the sense of a critical analysis of poetry (like William Empson's) or of art (like John Ruskin or Kenneth Clark) -- isn't done because the programmer and the community thinks of the code artefacts as obscolescent -- i.e., it will be out of date soon, so why bother. Why else no serious critical activity devoted to such a serious mental activity? Where are the software critics? Regards, Iian Sent from my iPhone On 02/12/2012, at 11:41 AM, Benoît Fleury <benoit.fle...@gmail.com> wrote: > "Although programming is a discipline with a very large canon of > existing work to draw from, the only code most programmers read is the > code they maintain." > > This topic came up a few times on this mailing list so I thought I > would share this talk I found interesting. > > https://yow.eventer.com/yow-2012-1012/cool-code-by-kevlin-henney-1181 > > - Benoit > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > fonc@vpri.org > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
