Slashdot Mirror
Hacker Survey
Lisa writes "A new entry in Tim O'Reilly's blog, titled "Creativity, Flow, and Joy in Programming" talks about a survey of IS developers with projects hosted by Sourceforge. The results were presented at O'Reilly's Open Source Convention last week. 60% said, 'With one more hour in the day, I would program.' 70% of the respondents volunteered that lack of sleep was the most significant cost of participation. Almost 50% of the respondents
agreed that 'When we prepare a program, it's just like composing poetry or music." OSDN has a page with the survey results in PDF or HTML. Slashdot is a part of OSDN.
As best I can tell 50% never bother to finish the project. It's like a bad sci-fi novel "and......a monster eats everyone..the end"
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
Open Source.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
and 2.) What were the other options????
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
From the article:
Almost 50% of the respondents agreed that "When we prepare a program, it's just like composing poetry or music."
So, at least 50% of the respondents are also poets or composers..? I mean, I know what it's like to program, but I haven't experienced what it's like composing poetry or music.
"I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy"
The same survey was repeated on a planet with a 25 hour day, and 60% said "With one more hour in the day, I would program." 70% of the respondents volunteered that lack of sleep was the most significant cost of participation.
Dude, you're an idiot.
After interacting with many programmers I fined that there are generally two different categories of programmers:
Artists - They may not be great at math, they may not be great at science, but when it comes to programming they have an intuitive nature about it - often making unique or "insightful" code. not necessarily the easiest to read... This would be the 50% that said that programming was like writing poetry.
Scientists - These are the sort that rely moreso on science and math. They tend to be slightly less intuitive in the code, but it is sometimes made up for by readability and correctness.
Of course, most programmers are a combination of the two, with one aspect slightly more dominant than the other.
I've found that I tend more towards the artist...
Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but copyright will always protect me.
"When we prepare a program, it's just like composing poetry or music."
I thougt it was just me. I love to use my cppToMp3 converter and listen to my codefiles.
All work and no play makes me a dull boy
They said that they expect an open source project leader to create the initial code base, integrate submissions, open minds to options, and provide motivation, but not to determine or delegate tasks, recruit contributors, or manage timing.
I.e. do the unglamerous bits and leave others to cherry-pick. And never impose deadlines on the team members.
I think most programmers would want this of their managers, whether they are working on open source or not!
For pities sake this is just plain sad. If there was one more hour in the day 60% of people would sit in front of a monitor ?
This would mean 365 hours extra coding, no "I'd meet up with friends", "go to club", "get a girlfriend", "have a bath".
Given an extra hour in the day I'd spend an extra hour with my wife and daughter.
For pities sake people, Mozart shagged his way around Austria and Germany while composing. Artists are famed for going out and getting laid.
Folks get your priorities straight, have a bath, get a girlfriend, get laid. And spend any extra hours repeating the last step.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
While I'm no genius programmer or guru, I can see where these people are coming from. There's something satisfying about finally figuring out how to solve a problem and making it work, and there are definitely bits of my code that I would call "beautiful", stuff that not only serves a purpose and solves the problem, but also does it in a particularly elegant or ingenious manner.
:)
Oh, and lack of sleep? Not a problem. Course, there was the 28-hour day I pulled last Friday (work at 8:00, break for lunch, went home at 2:00 PM on Saturday), but that doesn't count
Mark Erikson
"Jeff "hemos" Bates is a Director of OSDN Online and Executive Editor of Slashdot.org. Jeff "hemos" Bates
is a visionary of both space and time. Hemos handles everything from posting stories and book reviews to
ad sales and business development. As an author at Slashdot since the very beginning (1997) Hemos has
watched the rise of the interactive age. He has attended speaking engagements and conducted sessions at
multiple industry events, including MIT, LinuxWorld, Worchester Institute of Technology, Northern Michigan
University and Sun Developers Group. Hemos holds a Bachelor's degree in History."
Sure Company A's product is nice. But ours can do everything theirs can, and did we mention that it is free. It is our way of saying thank you to our clients (and slapping the competition for infringing on part of our market).
d00d, no you are!
kinda like 50% of slashdot stories are reposts:
2 /0 2/05/201259&mode=thread&tid=156
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=0
is lack of sex, especially when my wife wants to know why I'm "playing on the computer"!
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
The comparison of Paid programmers Versus the Free-prgrammers is quite interesting ... some items are flip floped.. while the basic premise is there...
Code should be free, and widely available..
it's kinda funny how the people actually creating believe it's stupid to lock something up so nobody can learn from it, yet those with zero crative talent (management) believe that it's a massive money-maker and must be protected better than fort-knox.
Has anyone ever found a rea-solid argument to keep sourceocde locked up and a super secret? other than lining your own pockets?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Speaking as someone who has spent significant amounts of time both composing music and writing programs, I can say that they aren't quite the same. Writing music can be much more carthartic (meanings 2) then programming. Composing music, at least the way I did it with a synth so you can hear it right away, can be emotionally freeing in a way that programming can't be.
Flip side, programming can be more exciting, in that it's easier to do something that nobody's done before or better then anybody's done before, with the right tools. Frankly, all the music YOU'LL ever write has basically been written; after hundreds of years of musical development, it's damned hard to find anything new to call your own. (It's not impossible, but very, very, very hard.)
The similarities are otherwise quite significant. With both, you do better and more work when you're "in the zone". There are some days where you just can't get anything done (interestingly, the overlap is not 100%; some days I could write music and not program, and vice versa). There's a lot of freedom, constrained by logic in both. (Whatever you may think, no music anyone will ever want to listen to is completely free of internal logic and consistency, and you violate those rules that we all know, even if we can't articulate them, at your own peril, just as with programming style.)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Dude, they are artists! They start with a blank vi session, much like and empty canvas or a blank LP. They might have a vague idea of what their end result will be, but the journey is always new and the finished product is seldom what was envisioned prior.
The creative juices flow, while the artist mixes his paint, the musician tunes his instruments, and the coder cracks his knuckles and sips Mountain Dew. Soon, the process begins, and art is created. A beautiful entity replaces the spaces of nothingness that previously existed, and the artist is sated and complete.
Now, at the end of the session, the coder releases his art under the GPL, allowing the world to see, touch, and modify the beauty that he created, while thge musician and artist rely on the concept of intellectual property to prevent the world from truly appreciating their work.
Yes. After a while, everyone gets sick of looking at their own code.
Its natural. Unless you're being paid to do it, why the hell should you force yourself to code?
most of the stuff I program is for personal reasons, i get bored and i'll write my own code, i know what they mean... writing code at work is different, i don't have any respect for that code, they tell me what to do and i do it, make code like this, but add these features, debug this, you broke that, ect. with my own code i can excercise my creativty, and i truly enjoy it
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
I think the results were analyzed very well. I particularly like the way they took the results and separated respondents into categories by motivations and contribution status: "Professionals" (paid for contribution, and do it for the work functionality), "Hobbyists" (completely non work-functionality), "Learning and Intellect" (motivation is intellectual stimulation), and "Community Believers" (believe that code should be open, and feel obligated to use).
Another interesting result for me as an undergraduate was that while sleep is the biggest thing lost by contributing to SourceForge, not many respondents felt the same about academic performance--leading me to believe that even though so much work is put in as to lose sleep over it, it may actually benefit college grades--which is what I've been told all along. Extracurriculars don't necessarily hurt your academics, in fact they can enhance it by giving you something else to focus on and enjoy. All in all a good survey.
"I may be quite wrong." - Socrates
The fact that my wrist is larger than your biceps should alert you to the fact that
E) You wank all day long.
Snik snik. Now go mop the floor by the fryer.
As a musician and developer with equal interest in both I have a hard time looking at my code and seeing poetry or music. When I look at code I see pure logic. (Go figure) That's not to say that logic isn't freakin' cool, however.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
What's with the stupid ``&093;'' character? How
did it creep into the posting, and got copied
and pasted into so many quotations?
-mi
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I have started two projects on sourceforge. One was on behalf of my former employer and we released the source code of the whole system under the Jabber PL. The project is still there, but neither I nor my employer is still maintaining it. You could add it to the "Project Cementery" of sourceforge (if they had one).
... well they all are way too happy with the new items at home, you know.
The second one was just registered a week ago. I have not yet released any files on sourceforge but have done so on my web site. Actually I opened the project just to have a mailing-list.
I spend almost two hours a day in this project, with almost five hours a day on weekends and on vacation. I have even asked for vacations at work just to get more time on the project. It's an open source project, but, even if a would like to have contributors I still have none.
So why do I do it? well thanks to it i just bought my new TV, freezer, laundry machine, DVD and PC. I give my project away for free, but charge for courses, documentation and solutions based on the system. As for today I have only had local customers, but I only hit the web last week.
As for the wife and kids
So they support me, I spend some time on my laptop and we all get new toys. Thanks to the LGPL (which is the license of my project and some tools I use within it).
Maybe this is kind of offtopic, but wanted to share it.
Life isn't like a box of chocolates. It's more like a jar of jalapenos. What you do today, might burn your ass tomorrow.
Every programmer feels the same at some point, Some great project. As for the extra hour to work, it all depends on the Project.
They should have used their 4 groups, and broken down the results more clearly (Statiscal distortion?? NEVER!). It would have been interesting how many of the 25% who do it for WORK, would want to do more?
But there is something to be said for 4:38 AM, eating crusty pizze, and finding that one lonely pointer has been misreferencing all night.... Ahh, the good old days...
"CPU's Don't make mistakes....They just miss a few cycles sometimes..."
This could get modded as offtopic, but having experienced flow myself in my job is extremely cool.
GOBACK.
They aren't artists...they are artisans. There's a difference.
Your search - cppToMp3 - did not match any documents.
No pages were found containing "cpptomp3".
---
Doesn't Exist... starting a sourceforge project for it?
M@
Krispy Cream is people
"When we prepare a program, it's just like composing poetry or music." Playing drums is MUCH easier!!!
Marbles up their arses! We'll get a bunch of C list celebraties on the show, and then get them to shove as many marbles up their arses as they can!
The one with the most marbles up their arse wins!
The little gem you can up with is bogus as well, considering it would one's forarm that increases in size due to wanking
You sound like you speak from experience. You'll go blind.
considering there arent actually any muscles in one's wrist, dumbass
No muscles in your wrists?! Jesus fucking christ man, get yourself to a doctor, quick!
Art can be appreciated by all, code is only appreciated by coders. Deal with it, you are not special. You are not a deep, troubled artist. You are a coder and every night you jerk off into a tube sock while watching Sailor Moon.
This survey was very interesting, and I'd like to applaud the authors for taking the time to do it. However, I have some sort of bizarre genetic defect that causes me to get cranky whenever someone uses the phrase "Generation X", so I can't help but foam a bit about slide 21 on v0.73 of the slides on the OSDN site.
The slide is titled "Open Source is a Generation X phenomenon". Don't draw too many conclusions from this data - although most Free/Open Source programmers may be 21-38 years old now, I'm sure plenty of those larval hackers who are presently younger will join in the fun once they've got some more coding experience under their belts.
I don't think the whole hacking phenomenon will die out in 60 years. So, although the graph shows a peak, what I think we're witnessing is the beginning of a phenomenon that will continue indefinitely (or at least until debuggers are made illegal).
Oh, and I hate this whole "Generation foo" marketing thing.
- Tim
You spent so long in anatomy classes you forgot to attend English I see.
Let me guess, the Playboys are all for "anatomy" classes, right? Fnar!
Its Roger Melly, your man on the Telly!
I think someone is waiting at the drive through window. Better hurry now!
Totally. The only person I've ever met who called herself an artisan was an utterly beautiful 29 year old AmerIndian woman with whom I danced all night and then proceeded to have a two week fling with. Artisans rule.
On the other hand, geeky programmers aren't artisans. An artisan creates through manual dexterity. Programming doesn't require dexterity.
I mean, yes, both of them happen to be fruit, but they're otherwise very different.
I'll agree that basic vi sucks, and I'm an avid vim user. But addressing your points one by one:
1. vim does
2. vim does
3. vim does
4. vim does, I believe. But then, I never use it, because I prefer a text editor to be a text editor and little else.
5. vim easily allows you to switch between buffers.
6. not sure if vim does this, but I'm sure you can write macros to do this.
In short, you, sir, are a troll. Not all of us like our text editors to try (badly) to be a newsreader, an e-mail client, and a web browser.
Best,
a fellow troll
.. I wonder how many of that 50% respondents have actually composed poetry or music?
I think "code choreographer" meets the goal of sounding "more faggy"
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this margin is too small to contain.
Firstly, I am a classical pianist, who dabbles in composition and studio production, and I was a computer science major.
It is extremly dangerous for programmers to consider what they do "an art". Programmers who use this reasoning generally consider themselves to be kin to painters. Only they can produce the image in the proper way (which is never true). Avoid this thinking! Programming *is* a creative process but it is much more like chamber music than it is painting.
In chamber music, musicians work together following a set of rules and guidelines to create music. They deviate slightly from the path, expressing their creativity, but not so much that they hinder other musicians from playing along. Their unique talent *contributes* to the complete music experience. Good creative ideas never hinder the ensemble. Programmers who consider what they do to be "art" tend to think nobody else is capable of altering their code, or contributing to it. Well some programming "divas" may succeed at the task, but in most projects this attitude won't stand. Besides at some level you are working with other people, even if it seems your not. Someone else wrote the compiler your using, and there is no doubt at some point you are refering to their work.
Learning to work as a programming group or community is key to success as a programmer. Programmers HATE classes where they have to work together because they suffer from bad coaches. I think much of this is due to the coaches being reformed divas.
Oh well i'm rambling and probably not making my point.
Rob
Tell me, do you apply the same arbitrary restriction to the term 'artist'?
Composing doesn't require manual dexterity, therefore composers aren't artists?
Computer art doesn't require manual dexterity, therefore computer art creators aren't artists?
What about the guy that welds junk together to express his art? Not much manual dexterity involved in using a torch...guess he's not an artist.
Your definition is far too restrictive to be correct.
With a 6 hour working day i would contribute to OSS a lot more.
I would also do the gardening more frequently!
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
{humor}
LIES! ALL LIES! I'll have you know I watch Tenchi Muyo when I jerk off!
{/humor}
Totally. Programming is just so mindnumbingly boring, except when you actually get into doing it. I'll regularly do more in one day than I'll accomplish in the next month, when doing real programming. (As opposed to scripting stuff.)
OPEN SOURCE TURNS ON HACKERS
"This project compared to my most creative experience is:"
My most creative effort 13.9%
Equally as creative 49.5%
Somewhat less creative 28.4%
Much less creative 8.1%
So we have more than 50% saying that the work they do for fun, love, and recognition in their spare time is as good or better than the work they do on company time.
This line on its own should be a cause for serious investigation into current software project management theory.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
Although even stravinsky composed some at the piano, most musicians don't know what the finished product will sound like until much later. If you have felt the whole experience at one sitting, then your only touching the surface of what could be an amazing musical experience.
Because I am unable to find the word 'fnar' in the english dictionary, it has been determined that you are a gay retard.
As you beat your bum left arm against your chest in anger whilst shouting 'DOY DOOOY', i'll be sitting here at work making more money in 2 weeks than you make in a year with your 'perl' programming. (which in your case happens to be allowing your daddy to give you a perl necklace than drawing things on your chest using his 'code')
Please give me some fresh french fries you rotting pile of iguana shit, these are as limp and flaccid as your wit.
An artist creates or performs in the fields of fine art. An artisan creates stuff with his hands.
The guy who welds crap together is an artist, by some people's standards, yes. Is he an artisan..? Debatable. If what he did took skill, yes. If he was a metalworker of roughly of the same ability level as myself, no.
I spent 18 months at an Open Source company, and never spent a single hour during company time in 18 months working on anything Open Source, including my own Open Source projects. I was certainly "expected" to put in 10+ hour days on the weekends though, without any additional compensation "for the good of the company".
Many Open Source developers are unemployed right now and still looking for work (259 days and counting for myself), and still contributing 100% of their time to their projects, while the "industry" at large continues to fire and lay off more and more qualified developers in the interest of "quarterly revenues". Trust me, nobody is getting more than half of their income from any company for working on projects that are given away gratis as the above slides lead you to believe.
I also reject the assertion that Sourceforge is leading the way in this regard. Sourceforge has been drifting for quite some time, and thousands of developers are leaving Sourceforge for want of better services every week. You don't see that on the surveys though, do you?
Uh oh, you've lost to an AC! Quick, call them gay and run away!
The attempt to push my own insult back at me was pathetic. I hope you're not required to use that sharp wit of yours while you're serving burgers!
Hey look, 5 O'Clock, time to go home.
You still havn't mopped the floor, either. Snik snik, FNAR!
I can absolutely identify. :^)
While I haven't done any real programming in years, I do enjoy advanced administration, learning, experimenting, just plain keeping my skills up.
Once in a while, I get blocked as you describe... no biggie, I have tons of hobbies to keep me busy. I'll just switch to working on my cars (I love modifying and restoring old sports-cars).
When I get tired of that... I just switch to electronics instead, etc.
One thing is definately cool, when you can take all of your hobbies and merge them at some point. I plan to use MegaSquirt in my TR7 and I may just make my own EFI brain from scratch for my TR8 (all three hobbies merged).
If I ever get tired of the above... I can always go snorkelling.
- Preferences: Solaris 10 (servers), Ubuntu (desktops), Solaris 11 (personal servers) -
I would strongly disagree with your comment.
Up until a few hundred years ago science and arts were one of the same. Looking back trough the course of history a hell of a lot of famous inventors, scientists and mathematicians were also artists.
Look at things like the works of Leonardo Davinci , the elements or any old biology book you care to mention.
Just because you have a high level of creativity and inspiration doesn't mean that you can't do the math or apply engineering first principles to a project.
Sure, some of the projects out there will be purely created artistically, and some may be enginered(very hard to do with software!) but a lot of projects and probably most of the best ones will be a mix of artistic inspiration and creativity, and engineering principles.
Personally when I start to code on the 'Unknown' I play around with a few creative ideas, then re work those creative ideas into an well designed piece of software.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Ooh, let's see we have the eloquent English programmer (snik snik FNAR is definitely a VIZ reference) and the medical expert of indeterminate, but probably American descent (generally where it's considered meritorious to earn more in 2 weeks than in someone else's year there are Americans near).
Wow, do you guys do this all the time. I usually browse on +1, I never realised what I was missing, I haven't seen thrust and riposte like this since, uh, oh yes since nursery (kindergarten for the American, if that's what you are).
I guess this is what is known as biting at the Trolls.
Oh, and
No I'm not gay,
No I'm not a programmer,
Yes I make a good living,
Yes I'm married (to a woman),
Yes I occasionally wank.
No, I've never indulged in sexual relations with family members.
There we are, now you have to come up with something original, go on see if you can, I dare you, no I DOUBLE DARE you.
Regards
John
...that the 50% that
agreed that "When we prepare a program, it's just like composing poetry or music."
have NEVER composed music or poetry.
Nice that you want to spend more time with your daughter, but sheesh you haven't married the mother yet?
Somewhat ironic in a post about 'pride' in your life.
If you consider a line of code to be a cord.
For a cord to sound correct in a musical composition there are a few rules that should be applied.
Each cord can only be interpreted in one way (when written in standard notation)
but the collection of cords that make up a piece of music can have different meanings to different people.
A software programme is the same, although each line of code can only perform one task the user and writer of the code can use/produce an application with the same creative style as a music composer.
n.b. This is a very abstract comment, but I hope you get hte jist!
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
In other words, programmers decided that programming compares favorably to highly creative and intellectually challenging undertakings. Well, shucks, never would've seen that one coming.
Folks get your priorities straight, have a bath, get a girlfriend, get laid. And spend any extra hours repeating the last step.
For most Slashdotters, spending more time in front of the computer IS getting more sex. So there's only one person in the room...
Snik Snik is technically an Office Pest reference, but could also be attributed to VIZ, yes.
Hey, you lot!
I have my wit sharpened once a fortnight.
I just pissed in that.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to hang myself in the toilet.
How the heck can anything be accomplished with less than 6 hours per week?
It would take forever to make anything operational.
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
... even though it is not a novel finding, is "98% male". This is more skewed than CS graduate school, for pete's sake. Do women never have a need to write code (or tweak/fix someone else's open source code) in their spare time? Or are they just less likely to release it for others to use? (or less likely to answer surveys about it afterwards, maybe? :)
Why?
"The Crystal Wind is the Storm, and the Storm is Data, and the Data is Life"
Maybe they could get this extra hour if they stopped reading Slashdot...
Two bugs that were hard to find. One happened to one of my friends, one to me.
... Doh!
My friend's bug: a line of his FORTRAN code should have said "DO 10 I = 1,10", but he mistyped the comma and used a period ("DO 10 I = 1.10"). FORTRAN just strips all blanks - took several days to find.
My personal favorite was a PL/I program that just wouldn't work - until I happened to look at the list of variables I had defined. There was the variable "O", big as day
Yes, debugging can be fun. David Kloper, though, points out that your code development runs a lot smoother if you don't put those bugs in, in the first place!
I got one poem published in one of the poetry.com books, it is titled Imagination. Yeah, it's cheesy, it was written by a lovestruck 11th-grader, so there :-p
It follows the same concept though. You have something you wish to express, and a set of language tools with which to express it. I've noticed that problem-solving in programming gives the exact same feeling as finding the correct words and phrases in poetry. I also find a good programming mood to equal a good poetic mood.
I would not be at all surprised if they were found to use nearly the exact same centers of the brain, for example.
Having never actually composed music in my life (I've played Piano, Bass and Trombone, a year each and that's it), I wouldn't know.
I am a science fantasy fan
nyah nyah! your name is john. nyah nyah!
Reading about this case, I could get the impression that since this moron is against it, the DMCA must be a good idea. Filtering in libraries is unconstitutional? Gimme a break. Oh yeah, the ACLU is bringing the case...morons, like I said.
Just where in the Constitution does it say that taxpayers have to fund the means for everyone to obtain information? Governments may choose to operate libraries, museums, or archives as a public service, but they are not obliged to do so by the U.S. Constitution.
Nor are local or federal government agencies required to give you access to any and all information your little brain lacks. If the library hasn't got a book, then you'll just have to find yourself a copy elsewhere. If you can't access a web site from the library, you'll just have to buy your own computer, or do without. Unless you're a clueless moron, of course--then you whine to the ACLU and file suit.
The DMCA is an important issue; it deserves a less trivial test case than this.
Not a lot more, but that's where multitasking comes in.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
"The stuff we call "software" is not like anything that human society is used to thinking
about. Software is something like a machine, and something like mathematics, and something
like language, and something like thought, and art, and information... but software is not
in fact any of those other things. The protean quality of software is one of the great
sources of its fascination. It also makes software very powerful, very subtle, very
unpredictable, and very risky. "
-Bruce Sterling
Good point. Interesting one this. Well, it is for us anyway.
The thing is, we always planned to marry on 1st March 2003. We planned this before the pregnancy, and still are getting married on that date. However, last year we discovered that our daughter was on the way and we had a choice. Should we rush the wedding and change our plans, or should we continue with what we always had in mind?
Our answer was to continue with our original plans, precisely because we had pride both in our daughter and in ourselves. We decided that rushing the wedding would imply there was something shameful about what we had done, and we utterly refute that premise.
Other peoples' choice in that situation may differ, and that is down to their personal belief and draws no criticism from us. Your point about pride is well taken though, and I am happy to confirm that it is precisley due to pride in our new family that we continued with our original plans.
Cheers,
Ian
The thing is, we always planned to marry on 1st March 2003.
Not that it's any of my business and for what it's worth (not a whole hell of a lot), but that sounds like a reasonable decision. It just sounded kind of funny in the context. :)
now time is just a measurement(I.E. 1 sec., 3 min., 245 hours) so one person's measurement of a second or minute or even hour could be different from another (or even our norm). so you can have a 25 hour day but it will be as long as our "24 hour" day.
So we agree then.
A line of code can be written in many different ways to perform the same task but with differnet emotions (performance, memory load, reduced IO, etc...). and the way it is interpreted is based on the overall tonality of the lines of code surrounding it.
Most of the projects I'm involved in comunicate ideas to a feeling machine;the end user or who ever's going to use the library. They frequently do more than you expected they would, and go beyond the bounds of your initial design.
Code is not precise. I've never worked on a project with precise requirements!
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
That sounds like high quality software. Where can I get some.
like my paw always said you get what you pay for.
Music is my major and I really enjoy it yet I still get "practicing block" and I know other people do too, you just don't feel like practicing for months at a time, of course I still do to an extent but not as much as when I'm really into it...
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Keynes said something like "economics is ideal for somebody with the temperament of an artist but not the talent." (I don't have the exact quote here.)
Visual C++ likewise.
hmmm....
Nope there are lots of ways to do this which give a fealing to the code.
Does the routine allocate the memory for you, or are you required to allocate the memory.
How are bounds checks performed.
are Buffer A and buffer B wrapped with classes or not.
If they are wrapped with classes what function can the classes perform, is the data accessed by getters/setters, is the buffer copy function in the class, is it static?
All of these variants give a feeling to the code and library, they provide a kind of tonal quality to the application that goes deeper than it's function or the user interface.
This kind of design is a bit deeper than the overall design patterns used for the application.
It's not just that the copy function works, it's how it works, how it's implemented and the feeling that it conveys to users of the function.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
2. 3. 4. vim. Vim vim vim. Lovely vim, wonderful vim. Emacs is the gold standard for syntax coloring, but vim's coloring is very good. It also does code prettifying, either with its internal capabilities or via unix integration.
However even vanilla vi is extensible via invoking external filters and commands. Believe me, it is not at all tough to perform text reformatting with external commands even in humble vi. If vi were your main text editor you would learn how to do it and be fine.
5. 6. I'm not sure what's available but these diff and cvs integration capabilities are certainly possible using vim scripting. In a one line macro you can put a canned CVS command using the current buffer filename.
And as for removing vi from Linux: it is a part of Posix and the editor of choice for many, so good luck with that.
Your script has some bizarre redundancy. How 'bout: