The hard part is finding the "well-written source code". Sure there are plenty that have been battle-tested for years, which we can refer to, but every day we come across tens to hundreds of github links. Some are legible. Some are clever but maybe interesting. Some are in need of serious refactoring. Some are first-attempts. Some are "drunken rants" (usually < 10 checkins, with every file marked as 6+ months ago). And once in a great while, some are worth some serious attention.
I "grew up" in PHP, and while the majority of the open source code I've read has been difficult to parse, at best, I've read some amazing code. Most from intelligent peers for whom I still hold a deep respect.
It's what has kept me inspired. It's what brought me to eventually appreciate Javascript (server and browser), Actionscript (3), Java, Python, C, Ruby, a few others, most recently including Clojure. And when it comes to amazing code (regardless of language), I will gladly sit and read with more intrigue than the best fiction has to offer.
It's the massive amount of mediocre or less that defines the divide making source code painful. I skim a lot. I look for whitespace, the occasional well-written comment block, proper variable / method naming, things to hint that this was written to be read by another human who likes to read, and from there I dig in deeper with the hopes that I have something worth reading.
That is to say, I LOVE to read code, but it can be difficult to find the code worthy of the smoking jacket and voting-age scotch.
I "grew up" in PHP, and while the majority of the open source code I've read has been difficult to parse, at best, I've read some amazing code. Most from intelligent peers for whom I still hold a deep respect.
It's what has kept me inspired. It's what brought me to eventually appreciate Javascript (server and browser), Actionscript (3), Java, Python, C, Ruby, a few others, most recently including Clojure. And when it comes to amazing code (regardless of language), I will gladly sit and read with more intrigue than the best fiction has to offer.
It's the massive amount of mediocre or less that defines the divide making source code painful. I skim a lot. I look for whitespace, the occasional well-written comment block, proper variable / method naming, things to hint that this was written to be read by another human who likes to read, and from there I dig in deeper with the hopes that I have something worth reading.
That is to say, I LOVE to read code, but it can be difficult to find the code worthy of the smoking jacket and voting-age scotch.