To anyone who gets confused by the parent comment, note that the line they're referring to has been updated. It used to read:
> Remember your first day reading production code? You probably did what I did - start at line 1, read every file top to bottom, get lost in the details.
Now it reads:
> Remember your first day reading production code? Without any experience with handling mature codebases, you probably quickly get lost in the details.
The change makes me question the authenticity of the text. I mean, did the author actually read files from top to bottom, or did he just write that because it suited his narrative?
That’s a trivial change to make for a line that did not receive the feedback that the author wanted. If that’s the case, maybe the text was more about saying what people wanted to hear than honestly portraying how to make AI read code better.
> Remember your first day reading production code? You probably did what I did - start at line 1, read every file top to bottom, get lost in the details.
Top to bottom left to right is how we read text (unless you are using Arabic or Hebrew!), the analogy was fine IMO. Don’t let one HN comment shake your confidence, while people here may be well intentioned they are not always right.
I've been a lurker on HN ever since I was a kid. I've seen over and over how HN is the most brusque & brutal online community.
But that's also why I love it. Taking every piece of feedback here to learn and improve in the future, and feeling grateful for the thousands of views my article is receiving!
Don't take this feedback too personally—remember that most HN users read and don't vote or comment, a subset of them read and vote, and only a tiny loud fraction of us actually comment.
Your article has been very well received, and it wasn't because that one line deceived people into paying attention, it's because the content is good.
When I started out, I did read code top-to-bottom. I was mostly self-taught and didn't have a mental model yet of how code was structured, so I relied on this "brute force" method to familiarize myself.
I suppose it's not safe to assume that everyone started out like this. But advael is guilty of assuming that nobody started out like this. And on top of that, conveying it in a very negative and critical way. Don't get discouraged.
This discussion is about junior professionals, not zero experience programmers. If a junior professional programmer is still starting at the top of files instead of at the entry points to the program or the points of interest, then they had a very poor education.
And, indeed, reading every file from top to bottom is very alien to me as a junior.
I would just try to get to the file I thought the change I needed was made and start trying and error. Definitely not checking the core files, much less creating a mental model of the architecture (the very concept of architecture would be alien to me then).
I would do get lost in irrelevant details (because I thought they were relevant), while completely missing the details that did matter.
> Remember your first day reading production code? You probably did what I did - start at line 1, read every file top to bottom, get lost in the details.
Now it reads:
> Remember your first day reading production code? Without any experience with handling mature codebases, you probably quickly get lost in the details.