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Ask Slashdot: Best Programs To Learn From?
First time accepted submitter camServo writes "I took C++ classes in college and I have played around with some scripting languages. We learned the basics of how to make C++ work with small programs, but when I see large open source projects, I never know where to even start to try and figure out how their code works. I'm wondering if any of you have suggestions for some nice open source projects to look at to get an idea for how programming works in the real world, so I can start giving back to the FOSS community." Where would you start?
No, it isn't. It's been maintained by a sequence of cliques via contributor-mentor relationships and is badly documented, with certain subsystems displaying a horrible lack of orthogonality.
Linux, on the other hand, is well worth studying - it's really been written for practical engineers by practical engineers, arranged and documented so that anyone sufficiently competent can contribute. Don't forget the O'Reilly books on understanding the kernel and writing device drivers.
If "the real world" means the corporate world, do this. Take an application you don't care about and don't know how to use, and assign yourself a bug to fix, and give yourself a deadline pulled from a RNG.
Code is developed this way:
Start developement
Shrink the team
Fire all but 1 guy who does all the maintenance
Bring in contractors
Add a few people
Shrink the team
Fire the 1 guy who knows everything
Scramble to find someone who knows the application
Bring in contractors
Select any step above at random
I'm not trying to be funny. End result is quirks, inconsistencies, inexplicable code blocks, bugs, performance issues, and all kinds of other bad things.
And if the code that *has* to be called to make the object valid fails, how do you prevent that object from being used when it fails? Can't use a return code as the programmer may simply ignore the return code and then blithely try to use the object that is now failing it's invariants. With the constructor throwing an exception, at least the code block that the variable was declared in will be exited, causing that variable to no longer be in scope, and thus cannot be accidentally used.