[Bf-committers] Sum up the long outside viewers post

[john tuffen]

Well, I didn't want to get drawn into this, but here goes...

Quoting Alexander Ewering <blender@instinctive.de>:

> 
> It seems to be a matter of taste. I personally had no problems
> with the Blender source code. From the first glance at it to my
> first finished project (Audio sequencer stuff) took me about 2
> days. I'm not saying that I'm necessarily a genius, but I guess
> it depends on how much effort you want to spend on a project, and
> how much it represents your own style of doing things.

Ok, so you're a fast learner... however, I have been very disappointed with 
the audio side of Blender (being a musician in my spare time, and a software 
engineer professionally). (My experience of the Blender codebase has been to 
try and remove drawing to the front-buffer in an attempt to fix my Radeon 
woes - I was successful up to a point: a solution which worked exceptionally 
well for me, caused horrible artefacts on a non-Radeon machine, so I scrapped 
it... it's currently on hold whilst I get some music written)

Anyway:

> Re-coding or "re-implementing" half of the Blender code base
> to make it "more attractive to [coding] newbies" is just as
> pointless (in my opinion) as making the UI more newbie-friendly.

In my opinion (and this flies in the face of the Linux community) code should 
be well-commented with adequate descriptions of methods/functions, as well as 
overviews/references to design/description documents. Stronger than that, my 
place of work (a software engineering firm) demands that code be maintainable -
 that means comments, design documents, and well structured code. That does 
not necessarily make the code slower/larger - but it does make it more 
portable, and clearer to understand.

> Blender's code is not for first-day "Hello World\n" coders.

Absolutely - but it might be nice for less-experienced coders to be able to 
look at the code, understand *what* a function is trying to do (via comments) 
and *how* it's being done (via the code). Re-coding is not necessary (unless 
in the process of commenting, bugs (or better algorithms) are found). 

It's one thing not wanting to be 'newbie-friendly', it's quite another to be 
actively 'newbie hostile' - elitism never won any friends...

john..

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