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.

  • erranto@lemmy.worldOP
    4·
    6 months ago

    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
      3·
      6 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.