Ask YC: Reading code of what open project had the most effect on you as a developer?

7 points·yan··4 comments

I usually learn "proper" development practices and methods from reading other people's code. I make a hobby out of hoarding vcs clones of known open source projects and reading them when I have some free time.

My question is what code-base had the most profound effect on your coding style? Even a small hack or elegant solution will do.

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About 3 years ago I was developing a Swing app for a customer that involved some pretty advanced (for me) features. Specifically the ability to "draw" shapes and move them around on a pallet. I was in over my head. Then I found:

http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/piccolo/

Which I just learned today is now being maintained here:

http://www.piccolo2d.org/

This project made me rethink GUI development. The naming of the classes in accordance to their responsibility made me realize I was over-thinking my own work and needed to use real life models (e.g. Camera, Layer). I used this library and was pleased and amazed at the work.

I don't know about most effective, but as for more effective recently, it was the code-base of Twisted. Not only did it have a lot of advanced libraries and what-not I had never encountered, but because it's been around forever I saw a sort if history of Python too.

The source to Hacker News, actually. (http://arclanguage.org/install) I'd gotten so used to software being bulky and complicated, I was quite inspired by what resulted from Paul's goal of minimizing the needed code size for an application.

Core Linux tools, such as echo.

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