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 > [email protected] > https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list [email protected] https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
