frownie's comments

Wiz / Imphobia here.. Damn, that is dedication. I didn't know there was a 160x200 X 4 bits resolution on the CGA card. How was that activated ?

Given enough time, can a ball bounce out of the labyrinth ? Obvously, not always. So, in which condition can this happen ?

I think this particular idea of storing information in the BSP leaves was the big innovation brought to us by Id Software. Now, the elephant in the room is : how to build a well balanced BSP tree... But well, that's an entirely different question (I was a computer geometry researcher years ago... :-) )

Ahhhh AppleSoft + whatever graphical extensions, GPLE, Toolkit Assembler (there was another assembler but I don't remember its name), Pascal UCSD in 80 columns,cp/m,... Memories...

Let me laugh. If they'd be successful, how open would they have been about the way they make it a success ? Call me cynic, but saying "it's do educate" seem quite pretentious to me. Show me how to win, not how not to loose.

I definitely concur with this. Acceptance tests are really powerful as they somewhat "imply" unit tests. Using your gut-feeling to write them makes the process less brute force than "proper unit testing"

How many of you are actually handling big Java projects ? Mine is not that big but big enough to have 15 sub projects, 200 dependencies, 5 people for maintenance, batch, GUI, JEE stuff. The only thing I can say is taht although Java is nice, the maven, release mgmt, spring stuff it needs to be actually manageable is absolutely enormous (the question is, how would I manage that in another language ?). Contrast that with interpreted/dynamic languages... No type safety ? But I don't have to wait 3 minutes 30x a day for my build to complete in order to check that my code is actually running... So well, there's room for compromise.

For me the tru force and problem with the java ecosystem is that it allows to separate concerns in the enterprise : a team to provide some Eclipse plugins, a team to handle release management, a team to deploy thnig on servers, a team for development, etc.

Damn you all, you're so naive...

1/ Amazon is a private company. 2/ You don't buy books from them, you buy a license to read them.

So by buying a book, you agree with their power. If you don't like to be in such control, then please, apply one of the start up credo : find a better competitor.

But don't complain, please.

(and the same goes with Apple who surely has some super control on your phone, and don't complain about FaceBook when they'll kill your account when you don't behave.)

Welcome to the privacy nightmare you all voted for by buying their shiny stuff.

Another option is : court ! Hey but you don't have enough money ? Hey, but that's what happens when you deal alone with a megacorp : you're just a small insect.

Funny people often forget that...

stF

OK, you have good insight. So here's the deal...

I'm rewriting an old, limited BASIC (!) application. So my "customer" knows quite well what he needs (he needs the same, but better). So requirements are rather easy to grasp. I also demonstrate progress every now and then so that he can get a good feeling of what I do. Now, the code has become good enough that I can give it to him to test it (and he'll behave as the usual customer : he will not test enough :-) ). Moreover, I have access to its current database => i've got a lot of data to validate the business rules side of the program.

Concerning the big bang now... The program is quite a "whole" so it's pretty hard to release a part of it. I basiacally made two parts : the classical ERP stuff and the time reporting (machines/humans). Also, working for a small, privately owned company, to replace an existing software is different than a brand new "super idea" web site. That is, the room for error is super small. And since it's a side project, I cannot provide on site support within 8 hours. Therefore, I think the big bang is the only option (well, for both parts of the program). As said, I'm working on a stable requirements basis => I'm confident I can manage the application development and code quality with standard testing...

In retrospect, I think the project is nice but a bit too big. 2 years, day in day out, is quite an endeavour. And although I like it, I feel it has to finish now...

In case you wonder : I didn't use an existing ERP solution because after some tests by my brother-in-law-customer, it appeared that they are either too expensive, too complicated/slow or they impose too much of an administrative burden (eg. ned to declare every single stocks before being able to actually write some production orders...) Hopefully, what we're doing will prove more efficient for our case (and, let's dream, there might be other people interested, I mean, rich people :-)))

stF

I have a side project which is writing a production management plant for my brother in law's company.. That's not exactly "a quick website", took me around 600 hours (six hundreds) so far. I've worked 2 hours a day, 4 days a week on average for more than 1.5 year now... Still doin' great. No web site so far. Not even github (what for? I'm the only one working on it :-))

The process is the purpose

try matrix multplication. I mean a real matrices, say 10000x10000. And once you're there, try a LU decomposition of matrix, with proper numerical erro handling. You'll soon get to the point where you fell it's harder than you tought. And BTW, matrix multiplication or LU decomposition are super fundamental stuff when solving equations (which in turn is super fundamental when you want to compute bridges, constructions, aerodynamics, etc...)

No clear winner...

I'd say there is a winner : Linux. Isn't it interesting that a software developped by a team of hacker (I'd say a chaotic, huge and ever growing) can make a monster like Ubuntu and get performances that don't pale against another OS which is designed by a very organised, super funded, super focused team of carefully selected programmers...

Ok, I assume a rather romatic view of linux development, but I'd bet I'm not that far from reality :-)

Just my own experience here. I commute every day, it's a 1 hour train trip in both directions. So I get 2 hours a day just for me. There I work on a side project. It means 8 hours a week. That's not much and a lot at the same time. The intersting thing is that I had to get used to it. Now I just do those two hours no matter what happens. It has become a routine and it's not that exhausting. Also, since 2 hours a day is not much, I have become very picky about my tools. In a one hour trip, I cannot aford to have my Eclipse to be up and running in 3 minutes => I changed editors. I cannot afford to spend 10 minutes trying to understand code I've written months ago, therefore I write my comments as I should, I write things as simple as I can. Since I only have one hour on a trip, it means I must solve my problems in that hour (if not, the time to start the task becomes too long). Therefore I choose my problems before getting in the train and I use a lot of "BUG", "FIXME" notes to put aside non urgent matters. I also don't have any web access in the train => impossible to get distracted (but then I need very good documentation to help me out when I need some information). The biggest hurdle to me is that moving from prototype to production-level takes a huge amount of time => sometimes a I set to work in the week end in order to have say 2-3 hours in a row to solve issues spanning across the whole code.

About choosing tools. I've selected ruby first, but ruby + Qt is not stable enough (I cannot afford to look for a strange bug in a C++ binding). So I moved to Python where things are better in that regard. I started with Eclipse (because it had a good and free Python IDE) but it takes too long to boot => now I'm in emacs. So although I prefer Eclipse or Ruby, I've deliberately chosen other tools to shave a few minutes here and there. (3 minutes is 5% of the time I have so that's important)

my ten eurocents

Opps, type : : "(as far as the compilation goes)"

However this doesn't proove that clang produce error-free (was afar the compiklation goes) executables.

Think of it this way : what is your social contribution (what do you give to other) with your work/time ? Do you think it is worth the effort ?

I think entrepreneurs are a bit more selfish : their prime motive is their own good, the social good is just a consequence. I don't think it is bad per se, ut I recognize I don't like it much.

Another point of view is : our society is based on employment (and other stuff, that is). Those who create employment are therefore seen as more useful, better.

But again, is giving employment to people to make cigarettes or junk food a real benefit to the society ?