I remember a high school instructor of mine always used the phrase stepwise refinement when talking to our class about program design and implementation. This method really hit home for me when I was in charge of a utility program that was just a small piece of an overall larger product. I had been given the task of maintaining this program and so I took a week or so to get accustomed to the code and then began in earnest to attempt to appease many customers who had support issues and problems with the utility.
Over the course of the next year or two as I maintained this utility I began by rewriting individual routines and then moved to modifying small sections of code in the end there were probably only a handful of the routines in the codebase that hadn't been completely rewritten.
Not that getting someone like RMS or ESR isn't a great idea, but you might try getting someone from your local area that is actually putting Open Source into practice. A colleague of mine and myself were guest speakers at a local LUG and we explained the various software packages we were using, why we chose those packages, and exactly what we were doing with them. The presentation was 6-8 months ago and we've both still been getting feedback from many of the users (as well as the president) about how they enjoyed our presentation. When it's a "real" person presenting sometimes it can make for a longer lasting impression.
I have to agree that this brings back an awful lot of memories.
Those first late night hacking sessions, learning the intracacies of the PC and it's architecture. Learning what a "register" was and then writing code in C that should have been done in assembly.
I have to admit that I still have my original disks and manuals for most of these compilers on my shelf at home. It's nice to see that they are being made freely available.
I do have to say that I find it interesting that Borland left so many "gaps" in the releases they posted. They may as well have posted every release (TP4, TP5). I can't see as it would have really hurt anything.
Ah well, at least these treasures from the past are available for reminiscing.
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Over the course of the next year or two as I maintained this utility I began by rewriting individual routines and then moved to modifying small sections of code in the end there were probably only a handful of the routines in the codebase that hadn't been completely rewritten.
Not that getting someone like RMS or ESR isn't a great idea, but you might try getting someone from your local area that is actually putting Open Source into practice. A colleague of mine and myself were guest speakers at a local LUG and we explained the various software packages we were using, why we chose those packages, and exactly what we were doing with them. The presentation was 6-8 months ago and we've both still been getting feedback from many of the users (as well as the president) about how they enjoyed our presentation. When it's a "real" person presenting sometimes it can make for a longer lasting impression.
I have to agree that this brings back an awful lot of memories.
Those first late night hacking sessions, learning the intracacies of the PC and it's architecture. Learning what a "register" was and then writing code in C that should have been done in assembly.
I have to admit that I still have my original disks and manuals for most of these compilers on my shelf at home. It's nice to see that they are being made freely available.
I do have to say that I find it interesting that Borland left so many "gaps" in the releases they posted. They may as well have posted every release (TP4, TP5). I can't see as it would have really hurt anything.
Ah well, at least these treasures from the past are available for reminiscing.