From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Date: Fri,  9 Jun 2006 17:28:50 -0700
From: Roman Shaposhnick <rvs@sun.com>
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Subject: Re: [9fans] quantity vs. quality
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On Fri, Jun 09, 2006 at 03:44:22PM -0700, David Leimbach wrote:
> On 6/9/06, Roman Shaposhnick <rvs@sun.com> wrote:
> >On Wed, Jun 07, 2006 at 11:05:12PM -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
> >> Too bad the example a beginning programmer
> >> sees now is the cess pool of open source cruft instead of well-written
> >> code.
> >
> >  And that would be the second most useful thing about Plan 9 -- its
> >  source code as a literature for educating oneself how the code is
> >  supposed to be written.
> >
> >Thanks,
> >Roman.
> 
> Except /sys/src/9/pc/pci.c that says it badly needs to be rewritten.
> Maybe a slightly less Kool-Aid drinking way to approach this would be
> to say "code that needs help is better marked, and there's less of
> that?"
  
  May be. I guess I feel passionate about it because Plan9 is the only
  source code that I can read and understand what's going on almost
  always without using a debugger. Maybe it is a cognitive limitation 
  on my part, and may be you guys are lucky enough to have more developed 
  perceptual capabilities but something like this: 
     http://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk/mplayer.c?view=markup&rev=18407
  or this:
     http://cvs.openssl.org/dir?d=openssl/crypto

  leaves me no chance of *learning* from it. Its all write-only code.

> There's a lot of "belief" here that I think is "fundamentally"
> dangerous... as with anything.

  Its not so much a belief but rather my personal experience. I do lots 
  of self-educating these days by trying to understand the limitations
  of a particular chunk of technology. Just the other day I was
  exploring the "graphics" (i.e. /dev/draw) approach to building a 
  desktop OS (expect more questions on this one from me a bit later ;-))
  And of course, the natural places to start were: libdraw, NeWS,
  Java2D and a bit of Quartz. libdraw wasn't the ideal one. True. But it
  was the only one where I can more or less understand what's going on
  by just reading the source. This principle holds true 99% of the time
  when I compare anything with Plan9. Does it say something about the
  quality of the code ? I don't know. About me ? Not sure. But that's the
  way it feels to me -- as subjective as it may be...

Thanks,
Roman.