this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
40 points (93.5% liked)

Programming

17366 readers
172 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
snowe@programming.dev
Ategon@programming.dev
MaungaHikoi@lemmy.nz
40
Algorithms instead of source code !! (lemmy.world)
submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by erranto@lemmy.world to c/programming@programming.dev
19 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Disclaimer : I am a hobbyist programmer, I have not gone to Uni for that , so I might not know everything I am talking about.

My question is why don't open source programs include something like diagrams of the algorithms they employ ?? I Was looking for algorithms for a chat program with client-server architecture, I was hoping to find diagrams and descriptions of how algorithms work, so a to study them an adapt them to my needs. All I found were FOSS projects with no such documentation.

Considering that reading source code can take a long time, and sometimes interesting projects are written in a language the user isn't familiar with, I was wondering why such documentation style doesn't exist ? It could help even newer contributors get started quicker.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] DrDeadCrash@programming.dev 14 points 9 months ago

Being able to document the exact algorithms used to solve a problem is sort of a 'Holy Grail' in programming. Most programmers aren't afforded the time to document to that level. This would require refining the code down to a single cohesive story that describes the functionality of the implementation. It's great when you can spend the time on it, but the problem is that the code is actually "working" long before that point. Most employers want to stop paying for code after it starts working.