

No, You are not Dumb. Programmers do spend a lot of time Understanding Code… - abhirakshit
http://blog.architexa.com/2010/05/no-you-are-not-dumb-programmers-do-spend-a-lot-of-time-understanding-code/

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rlpb
Part of the problem is how much "infrastructure" you need to learn too. What I
like about Python is that a lot of the infrastructure is common and so all
Python coders know it. In C and C++ every team seems to use a different set of
tools, libraries and debug macros which makes it harder to dive into a project
quickly.

On another note: is there any decent open source code study tool? I only know
of Source Navigator but it always felt bloated to me and the UI was always
quite tedious.

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abhirakshit
I agree that the current code study tools are hard to use and we need
something more intuitive. Many tools show too much information and are hard to
learn. Is this what you meant when you said that the UI was tedious and
bloated?

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rlpb
It seemed to take too many clicks and concentration to do the common things.
I'd like to be able to browse through source without the navigator getting in
the way, and it felt like I was fighting the UI all the time. The use of a
strange GUI toolkit (Tk?) didn't help. I don't mind learning a few keystrokes
if it means that I can do the basic things like navigating the call graph
without taking my eyes off the code.

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vineet
Yeah, developers on Open Source projects often don't spend as much time on
Design or UI Polish.

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mikeleeorg
Making your code open source is also a great way to make sure your code is
easy to understand.

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rlpb
Some open source code is shockingly bad and difficult to understand. Some is
rather good and a joy to work in (eg: Samba). I'm not sure the open source
-ness makes a difference. Perhaps it is just that the successful open source
projects that you've heard about or seen have easy to understand code, and
that is the reason for their success (sampling bias)?

~~~
mikeleeorg
That's a good point. Bad code can definitely appear anywhere. I like to think
that open source motivates good practices, like abhirakshit said, but I have
no statistics to back up that belief.

This would be a very interesting research topic though. If I had more time,
I'd attempt it. Anyone else know of such research, or want to try it? ;-)

