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Comment by halayli | Hacker News Reader

Usually you don't just go read source code for the heck of it. You read the source code either to contribute a feature or fix a bug. There's no point in reading the src otherwise because you won't find a good enough reason to try to fully understand it.

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Without having a specific goal it's difficult to read code. "Learning how it works" is not precise enough. It's not useless you learn stuff but you have nothing obvious to show yourself as an achievement. Rewritring or "deconstructing" the code is helpful to understand it.

I beg to differ. For example, reading the Go source is extremely useful both to learn idiomatic Go, and for reference.

It's the only language I've used so far where I feel comfortable going straight to the github source and figuring out how a library works instead of searching stackoverflow. In fact, since I've been writing a lot of code in Go, I've noticed my SO usage has dropped considerably.

skimming through the source is one thing, but reading with the intent to thoroughly understand it to a level that you can comfortably modify it is something else.

I've been reading the Docker source lately and I couldn't agree more.

I've been reading the code for Pound lately, trying to get a handle on where I'm getting some latency events. I'm really wishing I had something like dtrace for OpenBSD, since all I have is ktrace. You can get timing info out of it, but to get what I really want, I'm going to have to add some utrace calls at the appropriate points.

It can be useful to read source code other than for reasons you state:

https://www.google.co.in/search?q=code+reading+the+open+sour...

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