On Thu, 2003-06-26 at 14:05, optimus wrote:
> * 6. a professional programmer teaches by documentation; writing is hard but
> * the best software documentation has always been written by programmers
> * who were willing to make an extra effort
>
> Sacha Chua puts it more succinctly:
>
> A professional programmer best teaches by the source. No matter how good your
> documentation is, there is no substitute for the source code.
Huh? And why can't you put in the documentation the algorithm, db
schemas, flow charts, APIs, etc. etc. IMHO, these are more important
than the source itself. The problem with using the source only is that
it would be hard to implement something from source-only if you need to
use another platform/language.
Take a look at Ogg-Vorbis for example. The code is out, and some of it
even available under a BSD-type of licensing. But not too many
commercial adaptation of it. That's why you don't see that much devices
that can play Ogg-Vorbis. Why? Unfortunately, the guys at Xiph did not
have that much detailed specs on Ogg-Vorbis (at least during the beta
phase and the RCs for 1.0, don't know the situation today though). You
might say, why not use the source since it's available in BSD-style
license. Well, there are cases that you can't use the C source code to
implement on certain devices. For example, you want to make an
Ogg-Vorbis player using a DSP instead of a CPU like the ARM. With
limited resources on these kind of devices, using assembly language for
the DSP is the best choice. And in case you might ask, most of my music
collection were ripped from my CDs (not pirated) and encoded using Ogg.
Thee are some encoded in MP3s encoded ages ago when there was no Ogg
yet. Wasn't able to re-encode them because someone borrowed the CD and
that person never returned it to me. No use re-encoding it to Ogg as
audio will degrade mo in trans-coding.
Also, trying to understand code you haven't touched for a long time can
be hard and confusing, much more if you're trying to understand code
written by somebody else because of different coding styles/techniques.
Even worse if it's something from a Perl obfuscation/"writing the
shortest program" contest. ;)
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