Re: Not so cool uses of perl

Well, there are the Code Catacombs which contain a lot of real-life examples of our Craft. What what about the Cats is unsatisfactory to you? (Ooh! Awesome, I think I'm going to go code a virtual cat! /me runs off to post in Cool Uses For Perl. Hehe)

But seriously folks. One thing the OP made me think of was the fact that I'm a very young programmer in general, and I've literally never released anything to the world for general use. I'm in the middle of a project which I intend to put out there, but I really don't know how to push the quality high enough to see the light of day. Basically, I havn't ever had to refine my code beyond the point where it didn't have huge splinters sticking out of it.

So how does this relate to PM? I feel comfortable asking technical questions here. I suppose I will feel comfortable putting my code in harm's way when the time comes. Maybe this isn't the place to learn how to polish code (maybe that's something you can only learn by trying it, failing, and getting corrected). Maybe what I'm driving at is that in the code cats postings I've seen (and to be honest, I havn't read many and I havn't posted any) I've wanted to see more discussion and critique (esp. about design rather than technicalities of code) than debugging and praise. Honestly, this write-up is flawed by the fact that I don't really know that this balance between discussion and technicality is skewed, but when I post my code, I hope to get not only "Look! A giant, man-eating security hole!", but also a discussion of what makes the program useful, not useful, the interface clunky or smooth, etc. Basically I want this to be a place that nurtures the whole programmer - the technical side, the design side, the creative side, the utilitarian side.

If this post is rambling, my apologies. I spent a lot of time trying to whittle it into something thoughtful, but that's not necessarily saying I succeeded. =)

Peace!
LassiLantar

Comment on Re: Not so cool uses of perl

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Re^2: Not so cool uses of perl by hv (Prior) on Aug 03, 2004 at 12:08 UTC
If you ask specifically for discussion and critique, you will usually get some. See Permissions Utility Script for sysadmins - seeking comments for an example. The difficulty is finding the right sized chunk of code to post: too little and it'll be difficult to criticise the overall design, too much and few people are likely to read enough of the code to give useful comments. Of course, you can save time by first reading as many threads like the one mentioned above as you can find, and making sure that you have fixed anything that you can learn from them. :) Hugo	[reply]

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Re^2: Not so cool uses of perl
by hv (Prior) on Aug 03, 2004 at 12:08 UTC

If you ask specifically for discussion and critique, you will usually get some. See Permissions Utility Script for sysadmins - seeking comments for an example.

The difficulty is finding the right sized chunk of code to post: too little and it'll be difficult to criticise the overall design, too much and few people are likely to read enough of the code to give useful comments.

Of course, you can save time by first reading as many threads like the one mentioned above as you can find, and making sure that you have fixed anything that you can learn from them. :)

Hugo

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