I agree, but the response from certain Linux developers is that
"the source code is self documenting". Ya right. None of the
kernel source code would pass a review at any company I know of,
or even be accepted as a college/university assignment.
You have a very highly idealized view of what code is like in commercial
environments.
I've talked to a number of folks who have a spent a lot of time working
in such environments, and they've all told me that there's a lot of
unbelievable crap out there, in software which you may be using every
day. The issue is that in the "rush to market", there's often not time
to do full debugging and coding and internal documentational.
And after the code freeze deadline has been met, the next deadline,
with features that have already been promised to customers by the
salesmen, comes up so quickly there's often little time to clean up
after the short cuts that were made to meet the *last* code deadline.
This is why being able to read poorly documented code is a very
important real world skill....
- Ted
P.S. I myself have seen various OS source code from various big-name
Unix manufacturers, and all I can say is that I have a fresh understanding
why many of said companies either (a) don't want to show the source code
to customers at all, and (b) want people who do look at the source code
to agree to sign a NDA where in some cases they aren't even allowed to
make any negative comments about the company......