Re:Nobody's just reading your code
by stenecdote on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @08:28AM
(#16473127)
Hi kazinator, thanks for your comment (I'm the post's author). When I originally wrote the post, I actually had a whole section about "reading for questions", which discussed how the best way to read without modifying a program is to read to answer focused questions you have about the codebase. It kind of got lost when I shifted focus to active interaction versus passive exploration, but I agree that reading with questions in mind is far superior to just reading the code to understand it generally.
How the heck does this behavior (good or bad, expected or not) come about?
Is this correct behavior assured in every case?
What are all the possible values of these poorly documented configuration parameters or other inputs?
Will this apparently working operation break under concurrency?
Why is this so slow for these inputs, or under these conditions? / Why is this so unexpectedly fast?
Is this doing nasty covert things I don't want, in addition to the overt functionality that I want?
Is this using a particular library or OS feature to do something obvious, or did they roll their own?
How will this scale in time, memory use or whatever for certain large inputs that are too impractical to actually supply just to answer this question?
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