I could see that working in web frameworks, where the library code is often doing something vaguely similar to the application code. I'm not sure how well it translates out of that scene, though. Am I really supposed to be reading the GNU libc source in order to debug my problem? Or the LAPACK source? It can occasionally help, but much of the time it won't. Do you really understand how all those libraries operate? Should you have to?
I mean, even with web frameworks you could take this to the next level. Want to know how a bit of CSS works? Don't read the HTML5 docs--- just dig right into the Firefox and Chromium codebases to see what browsers actually do with it.
Ironically, LAPACK is for the most part pretty straight forward. Most of the code is simply shells out to BLAS routines. Because everything is matrix-matrix, it all maps reasonably well to how you'd explain it in a math textbook.
I mean, even with web frameworks you could take this to the next level. Want to know how a bit of CSS works? Don't read the HTML5 docs--- just dig right into the Firefox and Chromium codebases to see what browsers actually do with it.