begin quoting [EMAIL PROTECTED] as of Fri, Jun 02, 2006 at 10:50:55PM -0700:
> I've tried to avoid jobs where I have to read other
> people's source too in depth or too often.
Most people's source code isn't very well written.
> Compared to writing code yourself, learning other
> people's code in damn painful and tedious.
So is reading novels written with a second-grade command of the
language. It's painful, tedious, and you're motivated to go off
and do something else for awhile.
> This limits my chances to contribute to many
> open source projects unless I start projects myself.
The first thing I tend to do is to rewrite the code, but that
just offends the maintainers ("My code is self documenting. Why
did you go through and add vowels to all my variables?") -- and
I'm too lazy to fork a project for pretty code.
> Anyone else feel like I do? How fix?
We'd discussed this awhile back, IIRC, in IRC. Stuff like starting a
peer-review process -- don't look at what the code does, look at how
readable, comprehensible, and maintainable code is. Encourage the
community to create code that _isn't_ painful to read.
At the moment, nobody cares what code looks like, so long as it
runs. (Well, almost nobody. I hear good things about BSD and friends,
but I haven't gone looking at BSD code to see.) This does not
encourage beautiful code.
And making someone else's code beautiful isn't rewarding work. Thus,
it's not often done.
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