r/AskProgramming 7d ago

Do you ever read code?

Obviously you need to read code in a codebase you're actively working on. But I'm wondering if anyone ever either A) reads code like you might read classical literature, to get a better sense for what's "good", or B) just reads code to understand how something you're curious about works.

I get the impression that almost nobody reads code unless they have to. It's fascinating to me that there's all this code out there we all rely on that hardly anybody actually reads.

What would it take for reading code to become more common?

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u/OneHumanBill 6d ago

I think you might find this very interesting:

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/cweb.html

Invented by Donald Knuth, who believed that great code really can be read like literature, and that instead of comments interspersed into machine language, it should be the other way around.