On Sunday 29 October 2006 10:04, Attila Kinali wrote: > On Fri, 20 Oct 2006 11:36:37 -0400 > > "Timothy Miller" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > This is by no means an easy thing to do. I've always had a huge > > problem dealing with other people's code. This isn't a comment > > about their code but about various things about me that make it > > hard for me to glean the "big picture" from what they did, as well > > as resistance to other people's way of doing things. The other > > day, I was working on something for Howard, adding a feature to > > some of his code. When I first looked at it, I though, "This isn't > > how I would structure it at all!" So I started trying to rewrite > > it in a way that made the new feature fit in cleanly. Of course, I > > was going to do lots of copy/paste of useful stuff that was already > > there, right? In the process, I (a) ended up copying almost > > everything anyhow, and (b) finally had it dawn on me the big > > picture of what he was doing. At that point, his original code > > made perfect sense, and it became obvious as to how to add the new > > feature. This general attitude is a major flaw in me as an > > engineer. > > Nope, it's a generel flaw of engineeres who do not work in > companies with a strong peer review system (ie 99.999% of all > companies) and have never been in the OSS field. Reading and > understanding code is one of the most important abilities of any > engineer > (not limited to those who write C/C++/Java/VHDL/Verilog.., but > also including those who draw schematics). But unfortunately, > there is no school that teaches it and only very few decission > makers see its value.
There's a difference between reading code at the level of individual functions and constructs, like you would do in a code review, and reading code to try to figure out the overall architecture of the system. The latter should be unnecessary because there should be higher-level documentation that describes how the system is put together (and that kind of design work and documentation they _do_ teach). An engineer who comes to work at a nuclear powerplant doesn't spend three months crawling along pipes to figure out how the thing works either. He starts with an overview document and then progresses down into each subsystem recursively. The first kind of code reading generally isn't taught at universities, just like they don't teach you how to write code. Since most academics can't actually write proper code, that's probably for the best :-). Lourens
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