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

Programming

17492 readers
46 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 10 months ago* (last edited 10 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
[–] erranto@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

If you’re not that familiar with the language, it’s likely you won’t be contributing to the project.

You can still borrow and implement features developed by project x into project y , but I do understand the time limitation.

because I am more of a visual learner I wondered whether developers don't use diagrams and flow charts, or just don't include them in the docs.

[–] YIj54yALOJxEsY20eU@lemm.ee 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Personally I will jot some loose notes down if I'm implementing something thats sufficiently difficult, but formalizing the design patterns/algorithms is very time consuming so I don't.