On Sat, Sep 26, 2015 at 08:16:06AM +0100, KatolaZ wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 26, 2015 at 08:04:15AM +0200, Edward Bartolo wrote:
>
> [cut]
>
> >
> > I dedicated hours upon hours of my free time, often resulting in a
> > headache to complete the project within reasonable time. However, I go
> > a beating and a severe bashing instead of being guided to do better
> > the next time.
> >
>
> Again guys, the quality of a software does not improve of get worse if
> we spend more words about its pluses and minuses, or if we bring in
> the discussion more motivations and excuses about what we think is a
> plus or a minus. A software is good if it serves a need or solves a
> problem in a good way, whatever your notion of "good" is. If this
> happens, (some) people will use, change and improve it, and the
> software will survive. Otherwise, it will fall into oblivion, as has
> already happened for 99.9% of the code written so far.
>
> For Edward: I know it is almost unavoidable to get comments on the
> software you produce at a personal level, but as in any other creative
> activity, the take of the creator on his own creature might (or would?
> or should?) differ from the opinion of others. You should probably
> accept it and live with that, if you want to continue writing
> software. It's just impossible to make everybody happy, so if you want
> to keep coding just code for your own happiness, as every free
> software coder does. Sometimes your happiness will match the happiness
> of somebody else, while most of the times it will not. If this is a
> major problem for you, go choose another creative activity and have
> fun :)

For Edward:

You'll get feedback from users. when I had a job as a professional
programmer, my best days were the ones when I got actual feedback from
users, telling me what was wrong with the software I was in charge of
(often not written my me) or what they wanted done.

Someone was actually using what I was working on!

That gave it an immediacy and a purpose I never got from anything I just
wrote for myself.

And I learned from it.

I ended up discovering that you can't copy C string by assuming they
stop at the first zero byte. (Korean two-byte characters sometimes
contain zero bytes).

When the C interpreter I was maintaining failed to process a
users's program that was submitted in strict ANSI mode, I discovered
that code in Sun's include files violated the standard.

But the program that gave me the most joy was way back in the 60's, when
I was a complete amateur. THe keypunch operators had typed in a few
thousand cards of what now would be called a relational data base,
leaving the fields with missing data blank.

Disaster. The program that read it would read the cards in a way that
read blanks as zeros, which, unfortunately, were valid data. They
started retyping it with a newly chosen escape value to
reppresent missing data.

I intervened. I wrote a short assembly-language routine that read the
cards in alphanumeric mode, which could distinguish spaces from zeros,
and punch them out with theproper missing-data code.

They were much pleased. They really didn't want to repunch all those
data again. I gather that it had been relatively unpleasant, exacting
work. I was pleased too, to have saved them a lot of that work.

About the code you wrote. As I said elsewhere, I haven't read it. But
I have every intention of installing it when it's available from devuan
as a netman package. Currently I don't find it in jessie. I hope I'll
get to install it when it's ready, in this release or the next.

You are learning.

Keep at it.

-- hendrik


>
> Having said that, I also had a quick look to netman C code, and it
> seemed a bit kinky to me, even putting aside the fact that it does not
> compile out of the box, which is quite irritating as well...

A to what you should do next, please shepherd into the devuan release.
And follow up by maintaining it. Once it gets to users, you'll discover
what else it needs. I mean what else turns out to be essential
functionality no on thought of yet. I don't mean decorating it with
prettiness.

-- hendrik

>
> My2Cents
>
> KatolaZ
>
> --
> [ Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ --- GLUG Catania -- Freaknet Medialab ]
> [ me [at] katolaz.homeunix.net -- http://katolaz.homeunix.net -- ]
> [ GNU/Linux User:#325780/ICQ UIN: #258332181/GPG key ID 0B5F062F ]
> [ Fingerprint: 8E59 D6AA 445E FDB4 A153 3D5A 5F20 B3AE 0B5F 062F ]
> _______________________________________________
> Dng mailing list
> Dng@???
> https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng