Re: Teaching GNOME to students

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org>]

Hi Emmanuel,

Thanks for the interesting message.

On Fri, 2007-11-09 at 09:58 +0100, Emmanuel Fleury wrote:
[snip]
> None of my teachers, nor even other hackers that I know did push forward
> this obvious fact before Spinellis. And more strangely, no course have
> been yet made up to teach students to do so.

Yes, reading other people's code is indeed the only true way to master
programming.  Free Software encourages that by design, and that's how
many, if not most, of us learned to write good code.

> You may say that we lack of "good" code to read (whatever you mean by
> "good"). But since last decade Open Source projects are providing us
> with A LOT of code... "good" and "bad"... and, indeed, reading both
> "good" and "bad" code is absolutely necessary to know what "good" code
> is, to learn how to identify weaknesses in one project, to capture code
> gems or idioms that you will reuse all life long.

Free Software is full of good code indeed.  Some of projects put
creating good code in very high priority, and I'm honored to be
co-maintaining one such module in the GNOME environment.   It's the
cairo graphics library and I highly recommend using cairo as a real-life
example when you are covering GNOME.

  http://cairographics.org/

[snip]


Totally irrelevant but can't help thinking about The Tao of Programming:

  http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of-programming.html



Regards,
-- 
behdad
http://behdad.org/

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little
 Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
        -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759