Re: Re: How clean is your code

It is quite difficult to try to sell something opensource to management when there is profanity (or other "unprofessional" wording) in the documentation. Personnally, I do not have a problem with them (my wetware filters work pretty well), but the old "be conservative in what you generate, and liberal in what you accept" axiom is appropriate here. If I am recommending something, I feel it should also reflect on how I would code as well.

A few examples of what I have taken into consideration when recommending OS / Free software:

Emacs comes with a few man pages that I would be "professionally embarrased" to have my management find.
NSIS has some minor stuff in its documentation that I would not want to release to our customers ("installer that doesn't suck"), and IIRC, some stuff that raised my filters.

I guess I would agree with one of the previous posts that states "not to put anything in your code you wouldn't want the customer to find."

My $0.02.

--MidLifeXis

Comment on Re: Re: How clean is your code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Re: Re: How clean is your code by theorbtwo (Prior) on Feb 19, 2004 at 05:51 UTC
The question here is if the writers of emacs and NSIS care. For NSIS, that's easy to answer. Considering it came from NullSoft, whose flagship product's slogan is "it really kicks the llama's ass", I think the answer is a resounding no. They wanted, primarally, to give the community making plugins for winamp to have an "installer that doesn't suck". They could care less if your management likes the style in which the documentation is written. In fact, style does sell, and the style with a decent bit of profanity is what sells to their target audiance. Of course, as with many things emacs, their intent is largely "fuck if I know". However, promoting informality and usabilty is important to them, I think, and not frowning overly much at prophanity is part of that culture. Warning: Unless otherwise stated, code is untested. Do not use without understanding. Code is posted in the hopes it is useful, but without warranty. All copyrights are relinquished into the public domain unless otherwise stated. I am not an angel. I am capable of error, and err on a fairly regular basis. If I made a mistake, please let me know (such as by replying to this node).	[reply]
Re: Re: Re: Re: How clean is your code by MidLifeXis (Monsignor) on Feb 19, 2004 at 19:47 UTC
Oh, no doubt (on either one). I just am noting that I found a technically viable (and actually, quite good) solution to a problem, and thought twice about using it because I might have to defend some of the non-technical parts. :) --MidLifeXis	[reply]