Reading Code

I haven't written and songs in a while. Way too long. Like, maybe a year. Terrible. It dawned on me just now (though I'm sure I knew it a long time ago) - I write more songs, and better songs, when I'm playing other peoples music. This is especially true when the music is difficult for me to play in some way (maybe the guitar part is hard, maybe the vocals are hard, maybe the rhythm is weird).

Notice I said "playing" other peoples music and not "listening" to. However, when I'm listening to more music, I still write more than I do when I'm not. Its just that playing is even better.

I not sure if I tie playing and listening to music to two different actions in code reading. I might try here, but the real point is that I need to read more code. And, it has to be good code of course. I need to read good code, and a lot of it. If I do my, code will become better and better.

I suppose listening to music is like glancing over code once. You want to see it to know what it does, but you don't really care to understand the thought process behind it. I guess you don't have to do that when you are playing someone else's song, but I usually do. So playing someone else's music is like, reading code really hard. Getting into the head of the coder, like getting into the head of the song writer. You can just glance at code, and just listen to a song. But, if you want to get better, you have to really concentrate on it. The better the song, the better the code, the more work put in, the better the results.

At Oswego I don't think they did enough to say that we should always be reading good code. I think most schools probably don't stress this enough unfortunately. And, even more unfortunately, most of my professional career has been filled with terrible code. Because of those two things, I didn't read much code that was any good. I didn't even know that I should.

When I struggled for a few years after college, it wasn't really obvious what the problem was. I was far and away the most talented guy in my class (I'm not even ashamed to act arrogant about this anymore, its just plain true), yet it didn't seem to translate to professional success. Finally I started reading books. Not so much reading code, but lots and lots of books. Things started looking up.

I still haven't read good code though. Well, not that much of it. I need to read more. I'm certain that when I do my code will improve, maybe even dramatically. So, I plan to attempt to find some books on code reading, potentially this one: http://www.spinellis.gr/codereading/. But, thats obviously not enough. I need choose some good code to read.

What are some good OSS projects to start reading? I read through CruiseControl Java a bit, and it was ok. But it was a little bit boring. I suppose it helps to pick something I'm familiar with. I think the java.util.concurrent that Dr. Lea wrote is the best place to start. It might be Java, which I'm getting sick of, but I'm certain its some of the most well written code there is.

But here is something else important. I'd like to attempt to put together a bunch of code, somehow ordered by increasing difficulty. Why? So I could develop my own college course in code reading. It would be so fun to have a bunch of stuff in a bunch of different languages that gets more and more difficult to read, and have the students have to tell you what it does. And, add features to it. Oh man, what a good course. Its so practical too, thats what most of my development has been (though I wish it wasn't that way). Its been mostly - here is this code base, and I need you to add this feature to it.

I think this is an essential class probably missing from most CS or SE programs. Maybe I'm wrong and just talking out of my ass, but I know it was missing at Oswego, and I consider Oswego to be one of the finest CS schools.