[freshhawk]

Seems like a worse metaphor to me, naturalists don't examine specimens in order to learn how to make better animals but that's precisely the reason coders are expected to improve by reading code (although I always assumed that "reading code" meant reading it over and over to get a detailed understanding but apparently that was just me?).

What is the goal of reading literature we're talking about? We're mixing up reading a book for pleasure and gaining a deep understanding of a piece of literature to become a better writer.

Reading a piece of code or a book once is not going to do anything to your skillset as a producer, at least books are specifically written to be read once for pleasure. The equivalent for code would be using a piece of software, not reading the code once.

If you want to be a better writer then you get a deep understanding of a piece of literature, the same applies to code. I have recently read a lot of code, because I was debugging/modifying a library I was using (the Requests lib in Python). It's very nicely written and I did get some good ideas from it, but it was work.

I don't think the metaphor is flawed at all. I think that this was a result of coders thinking that people would get better at writing by reading literature or that this was the point of literature seminars. I guess a lesson in understanding other disciplines at least a little bit before trying to take lessons from them?