post 25

By anders pearson 12 Jul 2000

anyone who has discussed programming with me at length has probably heard me rant about the lack of emphasis on reading good source code in most CS programs. this is something that i firmly believe in; reading code written by clever experienced programmers and trying to understand exactly why they did things the way they did is an excellent way to improve your own programming. you’ll gain insight into how an experienced programmer approaches a problem as well as learning a thousand little tricks that they picked up along the way that are so simple and obvious that you’ll be ashamed you didn’t think of them yourself but which you know would probably have just never occurred to you in a million years.

with that in mind, i’d like to point out jamie zawinski’s implementation of message threading for Grendel as well as his thorough explanation of the algorithm and the reasoning behind it.

say what you will about the relative merits and disadvantages of open-source software, but without it, we’d never have the opportunity to read and learn from each others’ code. you may not use linux or emacs or mozilla. god knows 99% of the people that do use them never actually read the source code; i rarely do. but some people do and anyone can. that advances the art of programming. that alone makes the open-source movement entirely worthwhile as far as i’m concerned.