julianh65
Joined 6 years ago
Joined 6 years ago
I think the author of this makes some good points to this effect. I believe that the best approach is a bit inverse of what the author is saying however. I think that Math Academy should be the base, where 80-90% of your time is spent. The remaining 10-20% should be used to supplement this. Either with lectures, textbook / edutainment reading or other ways to develop more of that intuition.
Yet at the same time, a part of learning / understanding from reading other peoples code (given it's of good quality) is that you have to manually recreate what they're doing in your head without the comments.
I think for educational purposes the "educational comments" that you add have to hit a balance of explaining what the code does, without just explaining away an entire function. To that end, it might be better to add more comments in regards to specific lines, while letting the learner put the pieces of the different lines together themselves.
An extension that I'd like to see of this is many different types of codebases commented like this (OS, React, DBMS, etc etc) with additional information and diagrams about the overall design of the program and its different parts. Looking at and understanding a single file is all well and good, but without the context of how it fits into the bigger picture a lot of the potential learning is lost.