Response from Rich D to Ron Mitchell concerning Ron's comments
in one of his weekly articles.

Ron:
> It brings to mind an anecdote that was sufficient to convince 
 me that I might be better off finding another hobby. I have 
 not written a serious line of code since this particular
 experience, not because I didn't want to, but for reasons I'll 
 get to in a moment.

[story of being called on the carpet for "spaghetti code"
deleted]

Ron, this is terrible to hear!  I hadn't realized that the term
had a personal meaning that cut too close to home.

Ron:
> As mentioned earlier, I haven't written a line since.

This is our loss, and yours, because you're clearly clueful
enough to be a good programmer.

> My method was the 'code-now-plan-later-fly-by-the-buttseat' 
 school of computer programming.

This is a necessary "larval" stage for programmers.  Experience
usually forces you to outgrow it (as your desire to write more
complicated programs makes you write them, and find it's too 
hard without some kind of preplanning).  But the need for quick 
and dirty hacks never goes away.  You simply must recognize when
it's worth it to preplan and when to just type it in as you 
think of it.

Ron:
>It was a method that suited my purposes at the time. I
 certainly did have a whole pile of fun playing about, and I 
 discovered a whole pile of information about what wouldn't work.
 Those were the good old days.

Ron, I strongly encourage you to go back to those "good old
days" and roll around in that pile of fun.  Knowing what you do 
now (compared to then), even your improvisations will have some 
structure to them, without much conscious effort.

        [begin Rich's Philosophy of Life spiel]

It is better to be a doer than a spectator.  With computers as a
hobby, this means it's better to be a programmer than simply an
end user.  People who are only users are ultimately limited by 
what others manage to serve up for them.  If you can learn to 
take the bull by the horns, so to speak, you can serve yourself 
if nobody else is giving you just what you want.

[end PHIL 101; your mileage may vary, there will not be an exam]

So, please consider giving programming another go...and don't
take my Essentials of Programming Style comments personally.  You
should see the Microsoft BASIC 3.0 code for the Star Trek game I 
wrote for the IBM-PC in 1985-1988 (before QuickBASIC 4.5 made the
need for line numbers go away).
Or the data analysis programs I wrote (also in BASIC 3.0) for my
undergraduate research project in 1983-1984.  *Those* are spag-
hetti.  The Star Trek game in particular would be nice to port 
to the ADAM, but it would be easier to rewrite it.  Also, all 
the patches that I have done to make ADAMlink V and the hard 
disk version of PowerPaint, not to mention the patches to Smart-
BASIC 1.0 to make 1.x--in their native form, those are unmain-
tainable spaghetti. ADAMserve and the EOS-8 project are the 
only large ADAM programming projects I have written from the 
ground up according to the "rules".  (My current research pro-
grams are all in "good style", too, of necessity, since I have 
to regularly maintain and upgrade them.)

        *Rich*
-- 
Richard F. Drushel, Ph.D.            


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