Only if the source is structured and has readable names. Spaghetti code with made up variable names that only the programmer knows the meaning of (or may not even remember what they mean at all) isn’t that much better than combing through the disassembled machine code.
Which is fine for a.small and simple tool. But I have seen massive graphic/UI libraries with a documentation of about two pages and a non-working example.
Worst offenders I have to deal with is mediawiki. Some random hacker replaces some code with his own, and immeditely obsoletes the previous code that worked absolutely fine. The new code might work, too, but the concept, the philosophy is 100% different that the old interface. So e.g. the old interface made a call with 10 or 20 parameters, the new one makes a ton of calls of the type “add one or two parameters to an object”.
And of course the only documentation is just the excrement of a Doxygen call. Where nobody ever cared for the function description headers in the source.
My “favourite” one is a function with a parameter named “options” and a description as “option flags”. Nothing more. And the source of the function? Well, I have seen staighter spaghetti dinners.
If it is open source, you can read the source…
Or he can waste less time and download a properly documented open source tool.
Only if the source is structured and has readable names. Spaghetti code with made up variable names that only the programmer knows the meaning of (or may not even remember what they mean at all) isn’t that much better than combing through the disassembled machine code.
Which is fine for a.small and simple tool. But I have seen massive graphic/UI libraries with a documentation of about two pages and a non-working example.
Worst offenders I have to deal with is mediawiki. Some random hacker replaces some code with his own, and immeditely obsoletes the previous code that worked absolutely fine. The new code might work, too, but the concept, the philosophy is 100% different that the old interface. So e.g. the old interface made a call with 10 or 20 parameters, the new one makes a ton of calls of the type “add one or two parameters to an object”.
And of course the only documentation is just the excrement of a Doxygen call. Where nobody ever cared for the function description headers in the source.
My “favourite” one is a function with a parameter named “options” and a description as “option flags”. Nothing more. And the source of the function? Well, I have seen staighter spaghetti dinners.