Check Under the Hood!
Every day thousands of people buy cars. Most of them take a look under the hood, with no idea what it is they are looking at. So why waste the time? These people are looking for visual clues about how well the car was built.
Every day thousands of people build websites. Most of them have never seen the source code for the system they are working with.
The source is important
You can learn a lot about a project by looking at the source code. Just like the car buyers you can tell at a glance how elegantly the software was written. You don't need to understand any of the code...you can usually see this at a glance.
