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Comment on Reading Other People's Code (2012)

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It says "Entire businesses have been built on the idea of sharing and writing code, but not reading." and links to Github, implying that Github is not built on the idea of reading code.

I think that's an unfair characterization. Certainly Github could do more to make code readable, but part of the reason that Github took off and largely replaced other alternatives was that it made it much easier to actually read the code instead of hiding it behind all the extraneous project administrivia. The project's code is still the first thing you encounter on a project's page, even emphasized above its README. Github's code browser is actually pretty excellent compared to a lot of the alternatives. There's fast navigation between files and decent syntax highlighting for a wide variety of languages.

I know that I at least spend a lot of time reading code on Github; probably more time than I spend doing anything else on Github. At any given time, I have a half dozen or so browser tabs open with Github code pages on 3rd party libraries that I'm using.

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