I have been a hobbyist programmer for quite some years and have a few smaller projects under my belt: mostly smaller GUI applications that have a few classes at maximum, make use of one or two external libraries and are very thoroughly documented and commented.
Since I love the free software movement and philosophy, I wanted to start contributing to projects I like and help them out.
The thing is, the jump from “hobbyist” to “being able to understand super-efficient compact established repos”… seems to be very hard?
Like, looking into some of these projects, I see dozens upon dozens of classes, header files, with most of them being totally oblique to me. They use syntactic constructs I cannot decipher very well because they have been optimized to irrecognizability, sometimes I cannot even find the starting point of a program properly.
The code bases are decades old, use half the obscure compiler and language features, and the maintainers seem to be intimately familiar with everything to the point where I don’t even know what’s what or where to start. My projects were usually like four source files or so, not massive repositories with hundreds of scattered files, external configurations, edge cases, factories of factories, and so on.
If I want to change a simple thing like a placement of a button or - god knows! - introduce a new feature, I would not even remotely know where to start.
Is it just an extreme difficulty spike at this point that I have to trial-and-error through, or am I doing anything wrong?
That kinda follows the same question of why use windows. Some people that’s all they know, others still believe in the myth that GNU/Linux is only for geeks that want to be or are power users. Then there is the other faction that goes along the lines that there is no compatible alternative to what they use/ used to. A lot of alt programs still have a learning curve that is mostly caused by work flow muscle memory.
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Why not just use a GNU/Linux system?
I was considering it on my laptop but not for now
It’s just an os I’m most familiar with
That kinda follows the same question of why use windows. Some people that’s all they know, others still believe in the myth that GNU/Linux is only for geeks that want to be or are power users. Then there is the other faction that goes along the lines that there is no compatible alternative to what they use/ used to. A lot of alt programs still have a learning curve that is mostly caused by work flow muscle memory.