Comment by saretired

I agree that reading code is extremely important for improving as a programmer, but the code has to be read analytically. That’s hard work, because it means understanding the problems and subproblems that the code is solving. For example, you may have seen the longest identical subsequence algorithm used by diff, but analyzing the implementation in V7 Unix is a different learning experience. Or if you’ve studied interpreters, you could look at the awk sources maintained by Kernighan to see how a fairly complex interpreter fits together.