The argument in my head is running along the lines of
"You should re-write almost the WHOLE script. In fact, I'm thinking you should break it into three scripts for the sake of readability."
versus
"The script isn't great, but it's not totally shitcan terrible either. Work on it and it'll serve well."
Now, realistically, the first voice is righter than the second. (I didn't know what grep did a week ago. Go ahead, laugh all you want. I know where you live.) But, because I try to make correct decisions instead of fast ones, I'll compromise. I'll start my vacation early, get all my backups made at a leisurely pace (instead of all of them Thursday!) and prep the stuff for the rp'ing campaign.
Oh, right, I didn't mention that. The client (in a non-client role) has confided in me that several of our mutual acquaintances are hurtin' for rp'ing, so would I please GM?
I pretended to hold out. I love rp'ing, and I haven't in at least the three months I've been working on this. Maybe longer. :\ I'm not sure.
Of course, because the allure of this language just seems neverending to me, I'll rig up a linux distribution on my 486 in the living room. If I feel like coding on the script, I can - I just won't be able to test the same way. If I feel like playing with the language a bunch, I can do that too. (I can also access a bunch of stuff through my Zip drive, handy little bastard that it is.)
I can make a bunch of handling routines, stuff that wouldn't even touch the HTML, and see if everything's updating properly. Then, when the big bad box gets back, I can clean things up, fix things, properly test things, etc.
Glad it's under warranty, though. :\
What else...Buffy! I probably wouldn't be so mad at it if I could figure out WHY it nags me on the periphery of my mind so much, or why I can't seem to stop *watching* it. :(
I'm playing around with PerlMUD and I'm playing around with Perl. I tried to write a filter today, but I lost a finger in the process so I quit playing with it for now. Probably fix it later this week.
But it was so fun - I loved coding levels - I put a lot of sweat into one mud called PyroMUD, where I was also an admin. Then it completely disappeared in a server crash.
I wish they had PerlMUD back then
</NOSTALGIA>
Jason
Re:Ahhh ... mudding
jasonrene on 2002-01-09T05:44:12
Now now, Purdy, Pyromud never disappeared. We just started using invisible code.
Actually, it exists on a little gold CD that I rarely think about, and I have a bunch of college students (formerly 14 and 15 year olds from New Mexico [Kyp, Fishperson, Quasar, etc]) constantly emailing me, asking me to put it on a server somewhere so they can waste THEIR college years reviving the project.
Poor kiddies. Maybe one day I'll get around to sending it to them and ruining their lives:P
--Jason [aka Nightmare/Pyromud]
Throwing away something that mostly works is a good way to get to write all of the easy stuff and all of the fixed bugs all over again, while making new mistakes.
Think of it like revising an article or a book chapter. Unless Pudge comes down on you super hard, you're better off rephrasing things, moving paragraphs around, and adding more jokey footnotes than scrapping everything and starting over.
(Of course, if Pudge does say "That's completely wrong. You should delete all copies, grind that hard drive into dust, and set it on fire before I kick your ***!", then you should start over. I think that's completely out of his system, though.)
Seriously, learning the discipline of improving something that is ugly but mostly working will serve you very well. You might even get a job refactoring part of the Perl core library. Yikes.
Re:Rewriting is Rarely a Solution
chaoticset on 2001-11-28T17:02:40
I was rooting through the code earlier today in my discrete math class and I came to a similar conclusion: "Most of this works. I just need to fix some of the way I'm building my data structures and then add new stuff." This clinches it for me.It always feels better when I decide what I'm doing so I can get to the doing of it.
:)
