[saurik]

Reading a lot will not make you a good writer... and yet, I would have thought we would all be surprised if not reading at all didn't make you a bad writer (which is the angle taken by this article, as opposed to your strawman inversion). There are "great works" of software development, some of which aren't even in active production: the chance that they are codebase you will personally work on are approximately 0. Can you image a curriculum for literature or film or art or architecture or any other creative endeavor that didn't involve lots of critiques of old works? I cannot: it is firmly embedded in the entire concept of these fields... and yet, the vast majority of curriculums for software engineering do not involve ever cracking open existing real code -- not a pedagogical example to demonstrate how to do something in the small, but one of the great works of software, to see how things actually got done in the large -- to read, analyze, and critique.