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by groos 35 days ago
You missed the point - understanding comes from working through the code, not just reading it. This is nothing new: nobody has learned or done new mathematics or physics or whatever by just reading a textbook.
1 comments

Sure. But it’s a lot easier to learn nonlinear mathematics or quantum theory with a textbook than without. In this case you’re not learning about “what is a for loop”. You’re learning “why a OnceLock here rather than a RwLock”.

Many of us work on teams so we already have to deal with the majority of code being written by someone else. I’ve got code that’s more than a decade old, written by people I’ve never met.

Again, note that I said "work through" and not "read". Reading code is shallow. Debugging it, modifying it, inserting diagnostic code, etc. is not.