Isn't the pattern language literature exactly that? An effort to typeset
and edit interesting design artifacts.

BR
John
Den 2 dec 2012 10:30 skrev "Iian Neill" <[email protected]>:

> 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 obscolescent -- i.e., it will be out of date soon, so why bother.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 <[email protected]> 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
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