[swah]

I thought about doing something like this with projects I'd like to understand. Checkout the first version, try to understand that, checkout the diff to the next, etc.

I have some trouble understanding what exactly I'm looking at, at each point of the history. It would be easy if the developer told me, but not trivial to grasp by looking at it.

Also, the value of this early code might be questionable, since it will probably be dumped in the later versions, and you probably won't have access to the insights the author had to dump it.

And I'm not even a young developer. :/

[swah]

I'd love too see a screencast (Peepcode?) where some programmer attempted exactly that. Checkout an interesting project he never seen the code, and "think out loud" while trying to understand it. And don't throw the screencast away just because he can't grasp it, because that's exactly what happens with newbies who try to understand medium-to-large projects written by others.