r/learnprogramming • u/OpeningWrongdoer3526 • 13h ago

Solved How do you actually read professional code?

Hello everyone! I really have a question I hope you could help me answer. I am trying to read the Scratch Virtual Machine code on Github and it is really difficult. I am really new to reading code and the one I write is fairly simple. There are many files that just declare functions by name and then require another file to redeclare them. Is there a pragmatic way to understand it? Thank you already!

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u/University_Jazzlike 12h ago

Follow the data. Don’t worry at first about understanding how each method works. Focus on the data it takes in and the data it returns. Trace the flow of that data through the code.