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This seems like a totally unrealistic and impractical way of organizing a codebase. Living, useful codebases under active development need to be searchable and well tagged rather than laid out in "chapters" in my experience. In most scenarios it is also not a great use of time to try and read through a codebase line by line from A-Z.

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It works for me, it’s the only way I like to write programs, so I don’t know how to respond to the notion that it’s totally impossible. It’s not perfect, it has its own difficulties just like any way of doing things.

To clarify, and I mentioned this already, having “chapters” doesn’t mean you need to read every line in order. If chapter 1 is “Basic Setup of the BCK387 Chip” then you might want to skip to chapter 5, “Drawing Lines to the Screen” if that’s what you’re interested in, knowing that you can return for the preliminary details if you want.

Within any single source file, I will assume that you take some care to arrange parts in some sensible order. Why is it such a ridiculous idea to do this for the files themselves?

Usually the order imposed on files is to group like things together (instance variables, public methods, private methods, something like this). That’s actually somewhat hostile to the notion of making something read well from start to finish.

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