I tend to agree. But still, "self-documenting code" can tell you at best what it does. It cannot tell you:
why the code does what it does;
why the code doesn't do something else;
or a number of other things. For example, I sometimes encounter code that looks wrong but is in fact correct, even though I'm familiar with the problem domain. In such a case, an explanatory comment can guide my thoughts and save me having to spend time (perhaps incorrectly) figuring out whether it's a bug or not. In short: comments are very useful for getting another reader into your mindset, which will make maintenance much more straightforward.
You're spot on. I always feel a significant comedown the day after a really good party, even though I mostly have nothing more than food and alcohol at a party. And, if you're aware that this is all that is happening, and that it will pass, it makes the low much more tolerable.
Sometimes you can burn yourself out just by having to deal with lots of people.
It's hard to believe that, even among "the Community" itself, so many people are barking up the wrong tree. The question asked about open source software, not free software. Obviously Microsoft can't justify free (beer) software to its shareholders. The relevant, and more subtle, question is whether Microsoft can justify releasing its source code. Releasing source code is distinct from giving away software.
Bear in mind, that Microsoft already does reveal its source code to people who pay enough. However, if it supplied its source code to anyone who bought the built product (even with side-conditions that the source could not be used to commercial advantage etc etc), that would still constitute open source software. And the advantage to Microsoft would be many, many more knowledgeable people finding bugs. And the disadvantages would be that someone might pinch some ideas from it to help a competing product and also that a million custom patches for their products would appear, and be sure to interfere with each other.
Actually, the German version of Carmageddon had robots to run over, not even zombies. The zombies were in the UK version. In the UK case at least, a "blood patch" was released, being an "upgrade" to the full-gore version. I'm guessing this got round the censorship because the patch itself wasn't for sale - it was free.
Same for Carmageddon II.
The UK version of Carmageddon TDR 2000 (or III) never had an official blood patch. But a non-official one is readily available, made by fans, using the artwork from the US version. Unfortunately the pedestrians, though skinned as humans, still seem to have the zombie animation cycles! It looks a bit weird sometimes. Great game, though.
Richard Feynman was a very strong advocate of having somewhere to publish non-positive results. He was distressed by the credibility added to the existence of psychic powers, influence of star signs, alien abductions and so on, by scientific research. It arises from the fact that if you test your hypothesis to, say, the 5% level, then on average one in twenty researchers is going to get a false positive. People tend to publish the positive results, and the nineteen negative results get forgotten because they're boring, giving a misleading picture. Of course, all the research could be completely accurate, but the skewed statistics make that irrelevant.
So Feynman dearly wanted a Journal of the Null Hypothesis. I think I found that in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman".
I recall setting up a transparent cuboid (glass or perspex, I forget) to totally internally reflect light off one of its faces. When a second transparent cuboid was placed very close to the reflecting face, some light passed from the first cuboid into the second, and was visible coming out of the second cuboid. It happened even though the two blocks were not quite touching. This is a very simple way to demonstrate quantum tunneling.
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- why the code does what it does;
- why the code doesn't do something else;
or a number of other things. For example, I sometimes encounter code that looks wrong but is in fact correct, even though I'm familiar with the problem domain. In such a case, an explanatory comment can guide my thoughts and save me having to spend time (perhaps incorrectly) figuring out whether it's a bug or not. In short: comments are very useful for getting another reader into your mindset, which will make maintenance much more straightforward.You're spot on. I always feel a significant comedown the day after a really good party, even though I mostly have nothing more than food and alcohol at a party. And, if you're aware that this is all that is happening, and that it will pass, it makes the low much more tolerable.
Sometimes you can burn yourself out just by having to deal with lots of people.
No, it's funny anyway.
or 0.01 metre as we say when being uber-pedantic.
I wish more people would realise this...
It's hard to believe that, even among "the Community" itself, so many people are barking up the wrong tree. The question asked about open source software, not free software. Obviously Microsoft can't justify free (beer) software to its shareholders. The relevant, and more subtle, question is whether Microsoft can justify releasing its source code. Releasing source code is distinct from giving away software.
Bear in mind, that Microsoft already does reveal its source code to people who pay enough. However, if it supplied its source code to anyone who bought the built product (even with side-conditions that the source could not be used to commercial advantage etc etc), that would still constitute open source software. And the advantage to Microsoft would be many, many more knowledgeable people finding bugs. And the disadvantages would be that someone might pinch some ideas from it to help a competing product and also that a million custom patches for their products would appear, and be sure to interfere with each other.
Actually, the German version of Carmageddon had robots to run over, not even zombies. The zombies were in the UK version. In the UK case at least, a "blood patch" was released, being an "upgrade" to the full-gore version. I'm guessing this got round the censorship because the patch itself wasn't for sale - it was free.
Same for Carmageddon II.
The UK version of Carmageddon TDR 2000 (or III) never had an official blood patch. But a non-official one is readily available, made by fans, using the artwork from the US version. Unfortunately the pedestrians, though skinned as humans, still seem to have the zombie animation cycles! It looks a bit weird sometimes. Great game, though.
Richard Feynman was a very strong advocate of having somewhere to publish non-positive results. He was distressed by the credibility added to the existence of psychic powers, influence of star signs, alien abductions and so on, by scientific research. It arises from the fact that if you test your hypothesis to, say, the 5% level, then on average one in twenty researchers is going to get a false positive. People tend to publish the positive results, and the nineteen negative results get forgotten because they're boring, giving a misleading picture. Of course, all the research could be completely accurate, but the skewed statistics make that irrelevant.
So Feynman dearly wanted a Journal of the Null Hypothesis. I think I found that in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman".
I recall setting up a transparent cuboid (glass or perspex, I forget) to totally internally reflect light off one of its faces. When a second transparent cuboid was placed very close to the reflecting face, some light passed from the first cuboid into the second, and was visible coming out of the second cuboid. It happened even though the two blocks were not quite touching. This is a very simple way to demonstrate quantum tunneling.