Completely agree. But the tools don't make this very easy.<p>Back in college I was working on patches to OpenSSL, Chrome, Firefox, Apache, etc., to add support for TLS-SRP, and it was a huge pain to jump into these massive codebases and try to understand them. I was using Emacs and had all of the various language support modes configured, but go-to-definition and cross-references barely worked. Searching was slow, and if I wanted to discuss a piece of code with my CS lab partners, I couldn't just share a link.<p>A friend felt the same pain but then went to work at Google for a bit. At Google, they have some pretty amazing code reading/searching tools (see <a href="https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/43835.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...</a>), and these tools helped Google build a culture of thoroughly reading and reviewing code. The causality is bidirectional, but having good tools certainly played a role in Google's success.<p>That friend and I ended up building a product, Sourcegraph, initially for ourselves to make code reading easier. We've now built a successful business out of it with the help of an amazing team. Here it is pulling in the OpenBSD sources: <a href="https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/openbsd/src/-/blob/lib/libutil/bcrypt_pbkdf.c?q=bcrypt_pbkdf#L98-98:13" rel="nofollow">https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/openbsd/src/-/blob/lib/li...</a>. Sourcegraph has advanced features for several languages; see <a href="https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/mholt/caddy/-/blob/caddyhttp/httpserver/https.go#L22:23$references" rel="nofollow">https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/mholt/caddy/-/blob/caddyh...</a>, for example. If you love to read code (or want to), we hope you'll love our product. Email me if you have any feedback/requests.