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chaoticset on 2002-07-25T05:19:22

I didn't get a lot of Perl done, but I did indeed manage to squeeze a Fifty/Fifty out. I won't tonight, though. :( Today was the first day of taking calls at work, and I'm all out of energy now. Perhaps I can get a good rest, wake at the crack of dawn, and get in a lot of fresh code while the getting's good, first thing in the morning.

And maybe if I really try I can poop diamonds, too...but I doubt it.

Anyway, it doesn't matter. The teacher that was taking the CGI class with me sent me her scripts, and she's looking to fix the file upload. I have a guess of why it's not working, and fired off an email, but should probably look all the code over anyway, just for practice's sake -- maintaining code is likely something I'll end up doing at some point. Might as well start early.

One thing that struck me is the great length taken with her project to break it into multiple files. Newser was one script. 600 lines, sure, and two CSS and a template file and a database, but that's it.

Of course, Newser was a lot simpler, too.

Doesn't matter. I'm sure I'll have some interesting observations up reading the code.

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maintaining code

TeeJay on 2002-07-25T15:31:03

Oh yes, you will do a lot of maintaining other peoples code if you earn a living as programmer.

Much of the code will be written badly or at least in such a way as to really annoy you. Worse still you will probably have to debug programs in unfamiliar and lesser languages like Java or VB.

Hacking other peoples code is unpleasent at the best of times. If you are lucky then there is some documentation or some kind of guidelines on how things are done but usually there is neither.

One of the nice things about hacking OSS perl is much of the time there are general standards (like CPAN requirements, popular idioms, etc) and a lot of the code is written to high standard. I found Marcels code nicely written and was able to dig down to the bits I wanted to change in a couple of minutes no problem.