Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 17 Jul 1997 14:19:13 -0400 | From | "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <> | Subject | Re: Take A deep Breath |
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From: "Andrew E. Mileski" <aem@netcom.ca> Date: Tue, 15 Jul 1997 23:23:57 -0400 (EDT)
I agree, but the response from certain Linux developers is that "the source code is self documenting". Ya right. None of the kernel source code would pass a review at any company I know of, or even be accepted as a college/university assignment.
You have a very highly idealized view of what code is like in commercial environments.
I've talked to a number of folks who have a spent a lot of time working in such environments, and they've all told me that there's a lot of unbelievable crap out there, in software which you may be using every day. The issue is that in the "rush to market", there's often not time to do full debugging and coding and internal documentational.
And after the code freeze deadline has been met, the next deadline, with features that have already been promised to customers by the salesmen, comes up so quickly there's often little time to clean up after the short cuts that were made to meet the *last* code deadline.
This is why being able to read poorly documented code is a very important real world skill....
- Ted
P.S. I myself have seen various OS source code from various big-name Unix manufacturers, and all I can say is that I have a fresh understanding why many of said companies either (a) don't want to show the source code to customers at all, and (b) want people who do look at the source code to agree to sign a NDA where in some cases they aren't even allowed to make any negative comments about the company......
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